"Repetition is... the centerpiece in Kierkegaard's 'existential theory of the self.' For the self is defined by choice, as something to be 'won.' This is an ethical, not a metaphysical, account of the self, which treats the self not as a substance, a permanent presence which endures beneath the changing fortunes of age and bodily change, but as a task to be achieved - not as presence but as possibility...
[T]he ethical individual has long memory, stretching himself out toward his past, for which he assumes responsibility, even as he stretches himself out anticipatorily toward what is expected of him in the future...
But eventually the bravado of ethical repetition must come to grief. In the ethical, one needs only oneself, and that is its illusion... inasmuch as it calls upon nothing more than human resources, upon resolve and firmness of will, ethical repetition pushes ahead within the sphere of immanence...
Genuine repetition, which is absolutely transcendent and effected in virtue of the absurd, occurs only when the individual does not see how he can go on, when every rational human resource is exhausted. Then the individual gives up everything and awaits the thunderstorm...
In this mad religious economy, if one gives up everything, everything is repeated, returned, even a hundredfold, in virtue of the absurd. Here there is not sound reason but a 'play' in which the world, that is, the hand of God, is playing with man in order to humble his finite understanding and lead him into another and transcendent sphere."
(from Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics)
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