This project retraces activations of Kierkegaard in the development of polit­ical theology. It suggests alternative modes of states of exception than those attributed to him by Schmitt, Taubes and Agamben. Several Kierkegaardian themes open themselves to 'something like pure potential' in Agamben, namely: living death, animality, criminality, auto-constitution, modification, liturgy, love and certain articulations of improbabilities. Attention is drawn to a modal ontology and auto-constitution at work in Kierkegaard's writings, as well as a complicated and indissociable operation between killing and (...) letting-live in legalist exceptionalism, comparable to similar functions found in Foucault regarding the biopowers and necropolitics of territorial and governmental apparatuses. It closes in consideration of Kierkegaard's critique of enumeration, large numbers, and statistical probability alongside contemporary tele-technoscientific social controls via the online datafication of people by surveillance or platform capitalisms. After Kierkegaard, such apparatuses are perhaps suspect as calculated to tranquilize humanity into more docile subhumans as it fools folk into becoming part of its numbers. (*Accompanying file includes only front matter, abstract, and endnotes*). (shrink)

This article aims at making a case for the role of seduction in existential education, that is, education that focuses on the pupil’s life choices. First, the article attempts to show that the relationship between the teacher and the pupil can be understood as a form of seduction. Secondly, the article examines how such a relationship functions in practice. Thirdly, the article warns against dangerous aspects related to seduction, and lastly, the article offers five conditions for how seduction can be (...) used in a justifiable manner in existential education. (shrink)

This paper takes the position that the aim of existential teaching, i.e., teaching where existential questions are addressed, consists in educating the students in light of subjective truth, where the students are ‘educated’ to exist on their own, i.e., independent of the teacher. The question is whether it is possible to educate in light of existence. It is, in fact impossible, as existence is a subjective matter, meaning that it must be determined individually. In this way the existential teaching appears (...) thus: even though existence cannot be determined educationally, as it is a subjective matter, it does require some kind of education. However, the teacher cannot make use of pedagogical means that coerce the students to take responsibility for their subjective truth. A pedagogical ‘expedient’ is nonetheless required, which deprives of all types of constraint but still opens up for the students taking responsibility for their subjective truth. I argue that this expedient must be irony, but not all types of irony. I therefore discuss which conception of irony the existential teaching should and should not be connected with. (shrink)

There has been a significant increase in studies devoted to Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love in contemporary Kierkegaard research. There are several good reasons why this is so. The single theme that dominates, though, is the relation between preferential love and neighborly love. Are they reconcilable or not? The present paper recasts this discussion by situating Works of Love in the trajectory of deconstructive readings of community from Jean-Luc Nancy and onwards. It is divided into three sections. It is first (...) shown that a deconstructive take on preferential and neighborly love indicates how any community has a place for love as its condition of (im)possibility. The opening of this place is then located in the Christian love-commandment. Finally, the expanse of this place is found in the spreading-out of the promise of love. The paper is conceived as a step towards letting love find its place in the analytics of being-there—as the phenomenon which opens the “there” without losing its “with.” The paper concludes with a postscript that points towards this broader context. (shrink)

Søren Kierkegaard is often considered to be one of the most vocal critics of German idealism. The present paper analyzes the philosophical similarity between Friedrich Schelling ’s early idealistic work and Kierkegaard ’s existential writings, endeavoring to display Schelling ’s epic 1809 publication Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom as a possible forerunner to Kierkegaard. This juxtaposition reveals concrete similarity that supports the thesis that Schelling ’s work could have been of great inspirational value for Kierkegaard, especially Kierkegaard (...) ’s core concepts such as freedom, morality and God. However, Schelling ’s early work is primarily appreciated as a philosophy of nature, and therefore fundamentally different from Kierkegaard ’s theistic-psychological writings. The present paper tentatively opposes this distinction, concluding that if Schelling really is a forerunner to Kierkegaard, then we ought to appreciate Kierkegaard ’s writings as conveying more than a theological message. The conclusion suggests that Kierkegaard ’s writings should be interpreted in a broader philosophical context, closer to the metaphysical idealism he is often assumed to resist. (shrink)

Perhaps Kierkegaard’s most notorious—though pseudonymous—claim is that truth is subjectivity. This claim is commonly elaborated to mean that faith is a “how” and not a “what” . I show through a discussion of examples taken from throughout Kierkegaard’s writings that Kierkegaard accepts a basic insight of Kant’s philosophy: each experience implicitly includes an underlying unity—the object—that does not itself appear. Both Kant and Kierkegaard emphasize the importance of a “continuity of impressions,” which gives experience its unified structure beyond changing superficial (...) appearances. I show that Kierkegaardian faith requires an object in just this Kantian sense: the object of faith does not directly appear but is implicitly present in all experience. For Kant, this type of object is not “beyond” experience but is posited by reason as the unity of experience as a whole. In this respect at least, Kierkegaard’s account of faith shows similarities not just with Kant’s practical philosophy but with his metaphysics as well. (shrink)

By way of an interaction with Kierkegaard’s Point of View, this paper attempts to show the extent to which Kierkegaard’s Repetition was a poetic repetition of his own life. By comparing several of his published texts with journal entries and letters to friends, this paper traces the extent and degree of Kierkegaard’s poetic reflection and corresponding lack of existential immediacy. At its most extreme, this paper argues that Kierkegaard did not really exist in the typical sense of the term; or, (...) more precisely, that he only existed as a poetic repetition, an apotheosized ideal. Kierkegaard lived only insofar as he wrote himself into poetry. (shrink)

Throughout his works Kierkegaard repeatedly claims that the modern age has subverted authentic Christianity. While interpretations of Kierkegaard’s critique of the modern approach to religion abound, they generally agree that the critique is based on various conceptual distinctions regarding the limits of human reason, the epistemological differences between subjective and objective truth, or the nature of religious faith. Very little attention, however, has been paid to the prominent role authority plays in the critique or to the fact that according to (...) Kierkegaard it is disobedience to authority, and not any conceptual confusion, that is the primary fault of the flawed modern approach. This paper argues that Kierkegaard’s most fundamental indictment of the modern approach to religion is its disobedience to the authority of the Christian command. Given this, the paper then examines what, for Kierkegaard, is the basis on which a person should choose to submit to an alleged religious authority. (shrink)