Eftersnakken

Eftersnakken is Kierkegaard's Danish term for a specific mode of derivative speech — literally "after-saying" or "parroting" — in which a speaker reproduces another's discourse without originating it, while simultaneously concealing or denying this derivativeness. As deployed in McCormick's account (samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive, p.53), Eftersnakken is not mere innocent quotation or citation but a duplicitous iterative practice: the parrot does not merely repeat, it performs originality in the act of repeating. The Hegelian disciples in Denmark who are Kierkegaard's target claim to have surpassed Hegel even as they mechanically reiterate his formulations — what Kierkegaard calls snak (pretentious chatter) provides the rhetorical cover for the repetition. The concept thus names a pathology of intellectual mimicry in which derivative repetition is compounded by a delusional claim of having gone beyond the original.

This makes Eftersnakken structurally different from ordinary error or misreading: it is a motivated distortion, a self-deception in which the subject of discourse refuses to acknowledge its own secondariness. The parroting subject genuinely believes itself to be an originator. From a Lacanian vantage, this is a specimen of imaginary méconnaissance at the level of intellectual discourse — the ego-identification with the master-thinker (Hegel) generates an image of autonomous mastery that the subject then defends against any evidence of derivativeness. The "tedious" quality Kierkegaard attaches to Eftersnakken is not merely aesthetic: it signals the structural unproductivity of a repetition that generates no new encounter with the Real of thought, only the automaton-like recycling of signifiers.

Within samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive, Eftersnakken functions as a Kierkegaardian diagnostic tool for a broader argument about the social and intellectual pathologies of everyday talk (snak). It sits at the intersection of several cross-referenced canonical concepts. Most directly, it is a specification of Repetition: whereas Lacanian repetition (automaton) names the rule-governed, combinatory insistence of the signifying chain, Eftersnakken names a culturally and rhetorically situated form of that same automaton-logic, one in which the compulsive return of another's discourse is ideologically masked as originality. It shows what repetition looks like when it is not merely structural but socially performed and denied.

Eftersnakken also bears on Misreaders and Identity. The Hegelian disciples Kierkegaard targets are misreaders in the strong structural sense: their failure is not accidental but motivated by an imaginary identification with the master that makes genuine encounter with the text's difficulty intolerable. Their identity as thinkers depends on the fiction of having surpassed Hegel, so the repetition must be disavowed. This connects faintly to Anxiety as well: if the proximity of the original (Hegel's unassimilated difficulty) threatens to expose the derivative character of the disciple's thought, the inflationary claim to have gone beyond him functions as a defense against the anxiety of intellectual dependence. Finally, the concept resonates with Contradiction: the disciples embody a contradiction they cannot avow — they are simultaneously imitators and self-proclaimed originators — and it is precisely this unacknowledged contradiction that Kierkegaard's coinage Eftersnakken is designed to expose.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.53)

Kier ke gaard has a name for this iterative way of speaking: Eftersnakken. Its best translation is also the most derisive: 'parroting.'

The phrase "best translation is also the most derisive" is theoretically loaded because it signals that the correct conceptual rendering of Eftersnakken is inseparable from its polemical force — accuracy and contempt coincide, indicating that the concept is not a neutral description of a speech-act but a critical-diagnostic judgment. The word "iterative" immediately preceding also encodes the link to the structure of repetition (automaton), anchoring what might seem like a social critique firmly in a logic of compulsive, contentless recurrence.