Kierkegaard and Political Theory

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s radical Protestant philosophy of the individual, in which his leap of faith acts to the exclusion of a general conception of ethics, has become a model often quoted in contemporary philosophies of the political subject. Particularly thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou have tried to mobilize the intrinsically revolutionary implications of Christianity. Here, all constraints of the system are ignored and an “event of truth” without rational foundation is adopted in its place.

Kierkegaard and Political Theory examines how far Kierkegaard’s anti-institutional practice of a conceived idea pioneers a modernity defined as an argument, indeed as an experience, of the impossibility of rationally comprehending a system of thinking. Since religious and aesthetic experience functions as an experience of this impossibility, the coherence of the aesthetic and the religious and the resulting political dimension of this coherence have to be questioned.

The intention of the volume is to demonstrate, on the one hand, Kierkegaard’s singular position in this problematic and to reveal a possible Protestant basis of his thinking, and, on the other, to clarify where aspects of the aesthetic and the religious that cannot be rationalized intersect with the totalitarian.

The volume brings together contributions written by practitioners in very different fields, ranging from theology, sociology to philosophy, aesthetics and cultural theory. Examining a wide variety of Kierkegaard’s texts with fresh and innovative perspectives, the authors provide a new line of research in Kierkegaard studies that wishes to see the philosopher in the context of political thinking, thus redressing the notion that he was merely an acosmic and atomistic individualist.