Dread in Kierkegaard, continued

I felt that my last post had gotten a little messy as far clarifying Kierkegaard's structure of dread (Angst), so here we will continue where we left off after a short, clean summary of what we have already elaborated, and then continue on to show why precisely this is read by Heidegger as "thrown-ness" (Geworfenheit), as well as how the structure of dread reorients the phenomenon of the prohibition of desire.
We started out with the case of Adam, who was brought out of innocence and into guilt without knowledge of what might make him guilty--i.e. in ignorance. Kierkegaard explains that dread is what brings about this type of guilt, because it operates precisely by preserving the subject's ignorance. The key was to see how this preservation is accomplished. This is where things got a little too complicated, thanks to Kierkegaard's confusing language on this matter--although we may remark that the language is confused because it attempts to reduplicate and stay true to the very confusing and ambiguous nature of dread itself. But how it all unfolds is actually quite simple.
Dread brings one out of innocence and into guilt ignorantly--i.e. it preserves ignorance while rendering guilty--by confronting the subject with nothing that is knowable. That is, it confronts the subject with a nothing; something that is nothing to him as far as his knowledge goes. Thus the particularly uncanny nature of dread--and Heidegger brings this out more explicitly: one dreads something, but one does not know what one dreads. Something is there, and yet it is nothing to me. Why this is the case is simply because what is brought before one in this instance is not really what is important. In bringing something dreadful before a subject (i.e. a nothing), what dread accomplishes is to bring precisely the subject's own ability to dread to the fore along with this something. How? The act itself comes to be what is dreaded.
However, splitting the act up into a content and a form, as if what is dreaded is different from the act of dreading is dangerous, precisely because it covers up the depth of the interplay between the two. This is what I did in my last post, and I regret it. I should have explicated the following remark of Kierkegaard, which brings the phenomenon into complete clarity:

Innocence has now reached its apex. It is ignorance... but which precisely is dread, because its ignorance is about nothing. Here there is no knowledge... but the whole reality of knowledge is projected in dread as the immense nothing of ignorance.
-Nineteenth-Century Philosophy ed. Patrick Gardner, p. 313.

The moment of dread is the apex of ignorance. Everything revolves upon grasping the intricacies of the structure of dread at this particular point. At this moment, one is still ignorant, and is therefore still innocent--as we have often pointed out, one cannot really be held guilty regarding something one did not do knowingly. If we understand this state of the subject, we can then see that it is not only ignorant at this moment. In fact, "the whole reality of its knowledge," which is precisely its lack of knowledge, is made manifest, is "projected". One's ignorance in dread is such that it is made explicit and real. Why? Because in dread one is confronted with that which one cannot possibly know--a nothing. Nothing comes before one, and yet they dread it. This fact alone presses the ignorance of the innocent towards the most concrete state of reality. One is still ignorant, but at the same time this ignorance is made real to them, making them more suddenly than just ignorant.
Now, what is the character of this "more?" How is this new reality constituted? It is by answering this question that we can get a handle on the whole structure of dread. For it is also here, and here only, that one can begin to specify a difference between what is dreaded and dread itself. The concreteness or reality of one's ignorance is brought out in dread because, as we said, what is dreaded is precisely nothing. In saying this, we are saying two things: 1) that the subject's ignorance gathers itself together astonishingly such that we can say that it attains a level of "reality" that it did not previously possess, and 2) that reality itself is the byproduct of this gathering. It is by specifying the latter point as the real "object" of dread that we can say that it is what is "really" dreaded. This is slightly a distortion of what is happening, but only because what is happening is circular and feeds off of itself. If we wish to see what dread is, we have to break it up as this:

dread → what is dreaded
↓
what is "really" dreaded

Which, because there is nothing actually being dreaded, becomes this:

dread → nothing, that of which one is ignorant
↓
reality of ignorance

This is why we said in the last post that there was a difference between what is dreaded and dread itself--when there really isn't. It is just that the nothing in the face of which one has dread precisely engenders something that provokes the dread to confront this nothing more and more to the extent that one has to call this provocation itself that is engendered the "real" object of dread--that is, precisely because it has a consequence one has to point to it as the real thing that is dreaded. This is the real nature of the "dreamlike" state of dread--not because dread itself is like a fantasy of a particular object. The word "fantasy," and others like it ("wish," "desire") imply that one has an object that is not nothing, that there is another way that the knowledge, which merely appears as nothing to the ignorant subject, is known. This is not really what Kierkegaard is saying--though it is essentially commensurate with his structure. It is only insofar as we do not call this "different knowing" (perhaps unconscious knowing) a type of knowing at all that he will accept it however--otherwise one would still be knowing in some way, and therefore, on some level, guilty. This indeed is what Freud holds: it is the aim of psychoanalysis to confront the "different knowing" (the unconscious) precisely as the thing that is responsible and guilty in various acts and thereby to assuage its effects upon the conscious person. But Kierkegaard wants to maintain a stricter notion of ignorance (because he wants to maintain a stricter notion of guilt), and thus does not recognize any other type of knowing than knowing. I explain all this just to make the difference clear and to bring out why the usage of Freudian terms slipped its way into the last post--when terms like drive and desire are not quite accurate. Thus, what one dreads is and always will be nothing for Kierkegaard. He does not care to look behind the curtain of any subject's ignorance to see what is really there because he does not think that knowing what it is will change anything. (Here obviously Freud would disagree--an unconscious impulse to kill is a lot different than an unconscious impulse to desire something for him, and this admits of different ways for the subject to approach the unconscious. For Kierkegaard, all these ways are the same, and reduce to dread.) Kierkegaard stays on this side of subjectivity always, so that what comes to the fore is only ignorance.
Now, we have not answered our question. If the reality of one's own ignorance is what is really dreaded, what is this reality composed of if it is not a "different type of knowing?" Nothing other than the subject's own freedom, Kierkegaard says. How is this so?
Let's recap, one more time. In dreading nothing, and thereby producing the concreteness and reality of one's continual ignorance, it can be said that what is really dreaded is this reality. This reality is therefore composed of one's ability in the face of nothing to actually produce something real--even if it is only (and precisely) the reality of one's own inability to know the nothing that confronts one in dread. Thus, this ability is really what is brought out through dreading; it is really what makes up the reality of the ignorance that dread of the nothing produces. This ability Kierkegaard names the "possibility" of the subject. Thinking through what happens, we can say that it is essentially the constancy of one's ability to be--that is, to be ignorant. The bare fact that one can stay in front of nothing that one can know is what is made real for one in this moment, and this fact is of the essence of the subject.

I'll clear this up more later tonight--as of yet it is taking up too much time to explicate! No doubt this is because of my approach (as well as Kierkegaard's). There is an easier way to talk of the phenomenon of dread. Kierkegaard does it himself, and I'll leave you with that for now:

One may liken dread to dizziness. He whose eyes chances to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But the reason for it is just as much his eye as it is the precipice. For suppose he had not looked down.
Thus dread is the dizziness of freedom which occurs when... freedom gazes down into its own possibility, grasping at finiteness to sustain itself. In this dizziness freedom succumbs... That very instant everything is changed, and when freedom rises again it sees that it is guilty (315).