Published . Updated to add related reading links.
Boredom, imagination and the world in Heidegger, Wallace Stevens and Jørgen Leth
Master’s thesis in Comparative Literature · University of Copenhagen · 2005
English translation and new edition · 2026
In March 2005, I submitted a master’s thesis in Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen entitled Den positive kedsomhed – anslag til et nyt kedsomhedsbegreb (Positive Boredom – Towards a New Concept of Boredom).
The thesis asks whether boredom, traditionally understood as emptiness, meaninglessness and disconnection, might also contain a positive potential.
Its central argument is that boredom depends on how it is managed. It can be paralysing, but it can also create a point zero: a temporary suspension of our habitual relationship with the world from which imagination, attention and a renewed sense of reality may emerge.
The complete thesis is now available in an English translation and new edition (2026), alongside the original Danish thesis from 2005.
Download the English edition
Positive Boredom: Towards a New Concept of Boredom — Heidegger, Stevens, Leth
English translation and new edition, 2026.
[Download PDF — English, 92 pages]
Download the Danish original
Den positive kedsomhed – anslag til et nyt kedsomhedsbegreb. Heidegger – Stevens – Leth
Master’s thesis, University of Copenhagen, 2005.
[Download PDF — Danish, 89 pages]
Read the long-form essays
For an accessible introduction to the thesis and its central argument, read: Can Boredom Be Positive? Heidegger, Wallace Stevens, and Jørgen Leth
The article is also available in Danish: Kan kedsomhed være positiv? Heidegger, Wallace Stevens og Jørgen Leth
The central idea
Boredom is usually described as a condition in which the world loses its distinctions. Things become monotonous and indifferent; time slows down; the connection between the individual and the surrounding world seems to dissolve.
The thesis begins by accepting this experience but questioning the conclusion normally drawn from it. If boredom is characterised by an absence of meaning, engagement or connection, that absence need not be understood as purely negative. It may also be a state of openness.
This leads to the thesis’s central proposition:
Boredom depends on how it is managed.
Boredom cannot be located exclusively in the person who is bored or in the world that appears boring. It arises somewhere in between, in a disruption of the relationship between subject and world. I describe this disruption as a point zero.
The point zero is a stop, but it can also become a beginning. When our habitual relationship with things is suspended, a certain freedom appears: the possibility of seeing differently, changing perspective, imagining, framing and beginning again.
The thesis calls the artistic ways of using this opening strategies of the point zero.
Heidegger and boredom
Martin Heidegger provides the philosophical starting point. His analyses of boredom, anxiety and Nothing make it possible to understand an encounter with emptiness as more than a simple deficiency.
In the thesis, boredom is described as a messenger of Nothing: a state that carries nothingness into the world of things and temporarily deprives them of their familiar meaning. This is initially experienced as a crisis. Yet it may also create distance from an overly objectified world and make a new encounter with it possible.
Boredom is therefore not necessarily the problem itself. It may be both a symptom of the problem and part of its solution.
Wallace Stevens: boredom and imagination
The first literary study concerns the American poet Wallace Stevens.
In Stevens’s poetry, boredom is closely connected with separation. The individual is isolated from the world and from other people by what Stevens, in Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, calls “the celestial ennui of apartments”. The word apartments suggests both physical rooms and the divisions created by rational thought: to be apart rather than a part.
Stevens’s response is a return to “the first idea”: an imagined point of origin at which inherited names, concepts and categories have been washed away. This emptying is not the opposite of imagination. It creates the conditions in which imagination can begin working again.
Boredom thus becomes part of the creative process. By suspending the familiar world, it allows the poet to approach reality through new perspectives, new fictions and new combinations.
In poems such as Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, shifting perspective and concentrating attention on a few elements become ways of overcoming monotony. The goal is not a permanent retreat into the imagination, but a renewed encounter with the world.
Jørgen Leth: boredom and the world
The movement is different in the work of the Danish poet and filmmaker Jørgen Leth.
Where Stevens initially withdraws from an unsatisfactory world into the imagination, Leth turns towards the concrete world. For Leth, reality is potentially interesting already. The difficulty lies in our inability to see it with sufficient clarity and intensity.
His work therefore develops a number of practical strategies: the note, the catalogue, the frame, the camera, the chosen point and the change of perspective. A field is selected, delimited, examined and recorded. The frame imposes a simple structure within which the unpredictable details of reality can appear.
Leth’s point zero is captured in a sentence from Filmmaskinen: “I am at a loss, blank. That is what I want to make interesting and entertaining.”
Emptiness becomes the background against which something can emerge. The purpose of art is not to replace reality, but, as Leth writes elsewhere, to frame life so it can be seen.
Two ways back to the world
Stevens and Leth represent two contrasting approaches to boredom.
For Stevens, the world initially appears insufficient. The poet withdraws into imagination and returns to reality through fiction.
For Leth, the world is potentially sufficient, but the subject’s way of seeing it is not. He develops methods for directing attention back towards its surfaces, fragments and details.
Despite this difference, both writers turn the point zero into a space of movement. Their strategies involve perspective, play, fiction, repetition, variation and the loosening of fixed conventions. In both cases, boredom becomes the threshold of a renewed connection between subject and world.
Why publish the thesis now?
Parts of the research were later reworked and expanded in my book Leth og kedsomheden (2008), which focuses more directly on Jørgen Leth and includes conversations with him. The thesis itself, however, is a broader and independent piece of work. It develops the philosophical concept of positive boredom and brings Heidegger, Wallace Stevens and Jørgen Leth into a single argument.
Publishing the complete thesis also brings this broader construction back into view, particularly its discussion of Wallace Stevens, who is probably my favourite poet and whose role in the original project did not carry over into the later book.
For more than twenty years, the thesis mainly existed as a printed copy on my bookshelf and as an archived document at the Royal Danish Library. The original Danish text was made publicly available online in 2026. This English translation and new edition now makes the complete work accessible to an international readership.
I am not presenting it as a new thesis written today. Its argument, references and historical frame belong to the work completed in 2005. The English edition preserves that work rather than updating it to reflect later scholarship. But its central question may have acquired a new relevance in a culture where almost every moment of emptiness can be interrupted by a screen:
What happens to us if we interrupt boredom every time, before it has a chance to become a point zero?
Contents of the original thesis
- Introduction
- The concept of boredom
- Heidegger and boredom
- Finitude and openness
- Freedom and subject
- Being, boredom and poetry
- Wallace Stevens – boredom and imagination
- The boredom of separation
- Boredom, imagination and the first idea
- Perspectivism, condensation and reality
- The fullness of repetition and linguistic play
- Stevens and Heidegger
- Jørgen Leth – boredom and the world
- On Jørgen Leth
- Leth and Stevens
- The appearance of boredom
- Notes on the fragmented world
- The point-by-point encounter with reality
- Point zero and catalogue
- Framing life so it can be seen
- The aesthete, freedom of movement and perspectivism
- The world of sport: construction and reality
- Language and art
- Leth and Heidegger
- Conclusion
- Abstract in English
- Bibliography
Suggested citation
English edition
Wichmann, Jonathan. Positive Boredom: Towards a New Concept of Boredom — Heidegger, Stevens, Leth. English translation and new edition. 2026. Originally submitted as a master’s thesis at the University of Copenhagen in 2005.
Danish original
Wichmann, Jonathan. Den positive kedsomhed – anslag til et nyt kedsomhedsbegreb. Heidegger – Stevens – Leth. Master’s thesis, University of Copenhagen, 2005.
Related essays
The thesis’s discussion of Stevens is explored further in How the World Begins Again: Wallace Stevens and the Uses of Boredom. For an introduction to the broader argument, read Can Boredom Be Positive? or Kan kedsomhed være positiv?.