Introduction

In the past two decades, there has been a drastic transition in the overall aim and theoretical orientation of continental European philosophy. At the beginning of this transitional period, a certain sort of postmodernism still dominated much of the discourse of what was considered continental philosophy. This theoretical outlook inaugurated a period of discourse focused on the deconstruction of texts, the rethinking of traditional forms of ethics and a tendency to focus on latently theological concepts such as the neighbour, the other, alterity and the ineffable. Many of the figures traditionally associated with this tendency follow a loosely post-Heideggerian phenomenological tradition, including the likes of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. Such figures share in common a generally post-metaphysical orientation, in which both the possibilities of speaking about and gaining access to a necessary metaphysical structure or ontological absolute are denied.

It is thus not surprising that one of the common intellectual sources shared by many of the postmodern philosophers was Søren Kierkegaard, the anti-philosophical thinker whose religious insistence on the single individual before God stood in absolute opposition to the overarching metaphysical totalization of the Hegelian system. Many of these figures followed Heidegger in assuming that Kierkegaard had little to offer in way of a systematic ontology, but much to offer in terms of a pure existential account of human existence. If Kierkegaard was given new life in postmodern philosophy, the systematic thinkers of German idealism did not fare as well. The overarching metaphysical narrative underlying the idealist tradition, which attempted to give a systematic account of self and world, seemed to lose significance in the wake of the eulogy to classical metaphysics collectively authored by the philosophical voices of postmodernity. If the postwar European philosophical situation was largely faced with an either/or between German idealist metaphysics and existential-phenomenology, it seems that postmodern philosophy chose the latter tradition.

Contra the postmodern tradition, the first decade of the twenty-first century has begun to explore what happens on the other side of the death of metaphysics and the collapse of meta-narratives. Surprisingly, this push to explore the future of continental philosophy has begun to resemble an intellectual journey back into the key philosophical issues of the nineteenth century. Figures such as Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Catherine Malabou and Quentin Meillassoux have all, to various extents, returned to the sorts of theoretical concerns and debates that many of the dominant philosophical figures of the latter half of the twentieth century fought so hard to deconstruct. If the post-Hegelian of choice for postmodernism was Kierkegaard, many of the figures of this new brand of Continental materialism seem to fall clearly on the side of Karl Marx, and in most cases, this sensibility can largely be seen as a return to Hegel and the German idealist tradition itself. But while these figures are re-opening the questions of classical metaphysics and the ways in which we can systematically conceive of the relationship between self and world, they are clearly carrying this out through a materialization of the theoretical outlook of postmodern philosophy. Rather than attempting to arrive once again at a wholly systematic and consistent metaphysical system, this new tendency aims to think through the ontological inconsistency at the heart of reality itself. So rather than assume that our inability to consistently know the absolute is a sign of the absolute gap between the individual self and the structure of reality, these figures instead push forward the idea that this inconsistency is an aspect of material reality itself.

While many of the postmodern figures were interested in ethical implications of the end of metaphysics and the manner in which the death of God as traditionally conceived opened up the path to bring classically theological concepts back into the discussion; the contemporary turn in continental philosophy is marked by a clear emphasis on a certain brand of (largely Marxist-materialist) political thought and an avowed atheism which seeks to move past the theological tropes of the past century.

Following this, it is unsurprising that while twentieth century postmodern philosophy brought Kierkegaard back into vogue and once again made his work a crucial point of reference for those working in the area of continental philosophy, this recent turn (which we could refer to as the materialist turn) does not seem at first glance to have much use for a figure who offered that the highest point of existence is the religious and that traditional dialectical logic should be thrown aside for the sake of a leap of faith marked by an absolute paradox. If Kierkegaard had his second act in the latter half of the twentieth century, it seems to be the case that Hegel has made a triumphant return to the philosophical landscape during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Religious alterity has been replaced by a form of dialectical materialism that seems to have no more room for the theological and literary tropes of the melancholy Dane who has long been considered the absolute enemy of any brand of Hegelian logic.

Although it might seem that Kierkegaard would be disavowed by figures in the materialist turn, this has not been the case. Slavoj Žižek, arguably the most dominant figure of the recent materialist turn, dedicates an entire chapter of the book he refers to as his ‘magnum opus’ to a materialist reading of Kierkegaard in which he argues that contra the traditional reading, only a thin line separates the authorship of Kierkegaard from that of the German idealist tradition on one side and the dialectical materialist tradition on the other. Alain Badiou also has an entire chapter dedicated to a consideration of Kierkegaard in his most recent systematic work. Along with that, one of the newest voices in French philosophy, Quentin Meillassoux, has said that reckoning with the work of Kierkegaard would constitute an ‘ultimate finality of my system’.^[1] Given such proclamations, we must ask what these recent materialists are identifying in the work of Kierkegaard that the postmodern generation seemed to overlook. How can a religious and anti-metaphysical thinker serve as such a crucial point of reference for a group of thinkers concerned with thinking through questions of ontology, subjectivity and politics in an immanent and materialist fashion?

The present book is an attempt to argue that not only are these contemporary materialist philosophers absolutely correct in their various assertions that Kierkegaard’s thought bears a serious relation to both the systematic questions of German idealist philosophy and contemporary materialist political thought, but that in many ways they have failed to see just how much Kierkegaard has to offer contemporary materialist thought.

Along with this, this book claims that the ontological and systematic nature of Kierkegaard’s thought has been largely underappreciated and that, in turn, this has obscured a radical political potential in his work which could offer relevant critique to contemporary philosophical perspectives. It will be my argument that Kierkegaard’s authorship deserves a serious place within contemporary philosophical debates, specifically regarding the political, and that the path to this political potential must necessarily begin with a serious ontological consideration of the influence of the philosophical concerns of nineteenth-century idealism on Kierkegaard’s thought.

Broadly speaking, the structure of my argument will follow the previously mentioned claims by Žižek, the first being that there exists an ‘unexpected continuity between German idealism and Kierkegaard’ and the other, in which he claims ‘only a thin, almost imperceptible line separates Kierkegaard from dialectical materialism proper’.^[2] I will not only agree with Žižek’s interpretation on these points, but I will equally claim that they are necessarily related. It is only through Kierkegaard’s proximity to the ontological and systematic concerns of German idealism that he arrives at a philosophical position with a clear similarity to the political concerns of dialectical materialism. This book will begin with a reconsideration of the major themes and figures of the German idealist tradition with a specific focus on how these figures and themes set a certain philosophical trajectory that serves as a crucial point of both critical response and systematic influence for the work of Kierkegaard. Along with this reconsideration of the manner in which German idealism influenced the project of Kierkegaard, I also place emphasis on the manner in which many of the aspects of idealism Kierkegaard is known to be so adamantly against (the totalizing system, the self-positing subject, the immediate beginning of philosophy) are being reconsidered by contemporary scholarship. The aim is thus not only to perform a reading which places emphasis on Kierkegaard’s idealist tendencies, but to equally see the manner in which German idealism itself already places a surprising emphasis on concepts such as existential actuality and ontological contingency, which are central to contemporary materialist approaches.

This serves to set up a systematic framework by which Kierkegaard’s existential categories can be considered as properly ontological categories in an idealist fashion. This method is inspired by John Milbank’s essay, ‘The Sublime in Kierkegaard’, in which he claims that ‘Kierkegaard’s apparently “existential” categories are equally ontological categories’.^[3] While this article was written almost two decades ago, Milbank already notices the shifting tendencies in continental philosophy and through this places emphasis on the manner in which one can move past a postmodern interpretation of Kierkegaard without losing the unique emphasis on freedom and subjectivity. As he later argues in the same piece, it is not the case that Kierkegaard’s paradox signifies a pure lack of epistemological capacity on the part of the subject, ‘but rather reality itself is incessantly fractured between the actual and the possible, and within this rift “subjectivity” comes to be/becomes possible.’^[4] Here Milbank prefigures the materialist ontological turn seen in figures such as Badiou, Žižek and Meillassoux by making the argument that the sort of contingency underlying Kierkegaard’s account of subjectivity need not simply be attributed to some sort of divine transcendence standing outside of and against any coherent ontology, but instead, that this contingency is an aspect of the very structure of reality itself. In other words, we could say that Milbank is pointing to the manner in which one can reverse engineer an underlying systematic ontology out of Kierkegaard’s theory of subjectivity.^[5]

In a recent essay exploring the relationship between Kierkegaard and postmodernity, Steven Shakespeare points to the same Milbank piece and notes:

[Nevertheless], Milbank does lay down a necessary challenge for Kierkegaardian scholarship, especially as continental philosophy of religion’s love affair with the ‘other’ and with tropes of writing come under attack by new breeds of speculative thinking (such as that championed by Meillassoux). This presents a new opportunity to do the kind of work Milbank proposes, in which Kierkegaard’s existential and ontological commitments are understood in their profound interrelationship.^[6]

It would be fair to say that the present book is an attempt to take very seriously the ‘necessary challenge for Kierkegaardian scholarship’ described above by Shakespeare. And while this work aims at a renewed political reading of Kierkegaard, I set up the grounds for this reading by first following the lead of Milbank and systematically considering Kierkegaard’s existential work in explicitly ontological terms. Building on the systematic account of German idealism already offered, I outline a reading that identifies the underlying ontological structure at play in The Concept of Anxiety and subsequently builds upon this ontology through considering the way in which this leads to a systematic account of the spiritual self in The Sickness Unto Death. Along with this systematic account of the ontological structure underlying Kierkegaard’s account of anxiety and despair, it is of course necessary that I consider the theological elements of these works. Following the work of both David Wood and Žižek, I present a non-theological systematic account of the religious sphere of existence which does not restrict the movement of faithful subjectivity to particularly Christian religious practice but instead allows us to consider the way in which the individual can exists religiously in a whole host of existential commitments.

This reconsideration of the religious in wholly ontological terms allows me to then transition into a discussion of the political consequences of this ontological interpretation of the work of Kierkegaard. Through a recasting of the religious sphere and form of existence in ontological terms I am able to arrive at an underlying account of concepts such as possibility, contingency and relationality which anchor the dynamic nature of Kierkegaard’s existential categories. After this reverse engineering of the ontological out of the existential, I then consider the way in which this ontological interpretation allows us to reconceive the political potential at play in Kierkegaard’s authorship.

Rather than attempting to claim that Kierkegaard has any sort of underlying political philosophy hidden in his authorship, this reading involves a consideration of the political implications of the ontological categories previously arrived at through a consideration of the underlying basis of the existential categories. In this way, analyzing the grounds of the existential and ethical categories allows us to consider the consequences this systematic account of reality has on our ability to think the political. In this way, ontological categories such as possibility, contingency and freedom can be conceived in a political and social sense. One of the questions that may seem obvious at this point is: why does this matter? If Kierkegaard was merely a post-Hegelian figure who prefigures a sort of ontological structure present in contemporary materialist philosophy, why would contemporary philosophy need him? To respond to this concern, the present work shows how crucial the minimal difference between Kierkegaard’s emphasis on existential actuality and the idealist concern with conceptual actuality is when considered in the light of some of the lingering problems in contemporary materialist philosophy. Through a consideration of the problematic tension between the conceptual and affective aspects of recent French materialist philosophy, I will emphasize the way in which Kierkegaard offers a means of working through this tension that allows us to think the systematic structure of both the passionate individual and overarching relational social structures which characterize political actuality. It is precisely this underlying systematic structure of Kierkegaard’s thought that will prove so useful in problematizing, and eventually correcting, key elements of contemporary philosophical discourse on the ontological and political.

This is all grounded in what I refer to as Kierkegaard’s fractured dialectic, by which I mean a dialectical system that makes fracture, rather than unity, the starting point of both thought and existence. Rather than a traditionally conceived account of Hegelian dialectics that emphasizes a unitary beginning and a final moment of closure in absolute knowing, this fractured dialectic places primary emphasis on the unfinished and open nature of subjectivity and reality. This fractured dialectic thus offers the logical structure of idealist ontology while prefiguring much of the existential and political emphasis of recent European philosophy.

This structure subsequently leads to political considerations as the shift from postmodernity back to systematic and materialist philosophies has been marked by a return to explicitly political thinking. While this has been a welcome return in many senses, this re-emphasis on the political has brought with it a number of new problems and issues. One of the most obvious issues has been a failure to seriously think through the existence, and internal structure, of the individual self and the reality of external social and political structures in such a way that does not collapse the one into the other. If postmodern philosophy often placed a crucial emphasis on the ethical existence of the individual while avoiding the overarching structure of classical Marxist political thought, the new materialists often seem to provide a structural account of political reality that excludes a serious consideration of the internal structure of the individual self. The final sections of this book will attempt to utilize Kierkegaard’s fractured dialectic to point towards some solutions to what I will call the internal/external problem in the thought of Alain Badiou.

Following this, it will be seen that this reading matters for historical, systematic and political reasons. Historically, it allows us to consider the proximity between Kierkegaard and the German idealists in a new light that places emphasis on both the ontological nature of Kierkegaard’s thought as well as on the existential nature of certain strands of idealist thought. Systematically, this work builds upon the contention made by some that there is in fact a systematic structure at the heart of Kierkegaard’s religious authorship by offering a systematic and ontological interpretation of his thought. Finally, this reading not only allows us to consider the manner in which Kierkegaard’s ontological structure prefigures much that has taken place in contemporary materialist philosophical discourse but also, and more importantly, makes it possible to offer both criticism and corrective to some of the shortcomings contained in the philosophies of the materialist turn.

The method that informs this book consists of three aspects. The first two, which have previously been outlined, are a reconsideration of the ontology of German idealism and a subsequent systematic account of Kierkegaard in light of this ontological structure. The third aspect of this work is a shift to a theoretical perspective utilized in a specific form of contemporary materialist philosophy that is referred to as transcendental materialism. While there will be detailed discussion of this recent materialist perspective throughout the book, it is worth briefly outlining what this perspective entails and what sort of materialism it advocates.

In basic terms, transcendental materialism is an attempt to develop an ontological structure out of a theory of free human subjectivity. Adrian Johnston has recently codified this term in his work Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity.^[7] I am using this term to refer to a philosophical sensibility which aims to articulate a materialist theory of subjectivity and which attempts to materially ground a more-than-material form of subjective freedom and activity without reference to any form of primary transcendence on the one hand or any form of consistent naturalism on the other. In this sense, materialism is simply the assertion that reality itself is non-all, meaning incomplete and engaged in a process of becoming. Another recent figure that could be loosely identified with a transcendental materialist perspective, Catherine Malabou, has recently described what she calls a ‘reasonable materialism’, which is that ‘the natural contradicts itself and that thought is the fruit of this contradiction’.^[8] In this sense we would say that the more-than-material process of human thought is a product of the contradiction contained in matter itself, and thus the transcendental categories arrived at through human speculation are still grounded in material processes.

While the issue of matter will be discussed more thoroughly later in the book, we could say in minimal terms that, in contemporary materialist philosophy, the concept of matter signifies that matter is both ontologically primary and that matter itself is marked by incompletion. Materialism differs from traditional naturalism in this sense, as this sort of materialism considers reality as fundamentally non-all and marked by incompletion and, thus, could never say that anything is either natural or unnatural in a consistent sense.

By the ontological, I am here referring to something distinct from the project of classical metaphysics, which aims to account for the reason or necessity that can explain the fundamental nature of reality. Instead, by ontological I mean a systematic discourse that attempts to give a structural account of existence and our ability to understand this structure. If a coherent metaphysics needs to account for some sort of necessity that is primary and subsequently orders being, the ontological is here understood—given that other understandings of the ontological are possible—as that which acknowledges the primacy of contingency and a lack of necessity.

Ultimately I hope that the perspective of transcendental materialism will make it possible for me to present a systematic and non-theological interpretation of the thought of Kierkegaard that does not simply ignore the centrality of religious categories but, instead, offers a way to think through the religious in a wholly immanent and materialist fashion. In this way, I hope to demonstrate that this reading of Kierkegaard can show why philosophy of religion need not be afraid of materialism, and equally, materialism need not practice a sort of reactionary atheism in the face of the religious. Along with this, I hope to emphasize the manner by which this systematic reading of Kierkegaard could serve as a needed corrective to some of the lingering philosophical issues in recent materialism.

Before moving on, it is worth noting that in this book I do not simply seek to interpret Kierkegaard in some new sense but rather to inherit the thought of Kierkegaard through a reaffirmation of his legacy in a contemporary philosophical context to ‘make it live on in a different way’.^[9] As Martin Hägglund has recently stated in regard to his own inheritance of the project of Jacques Derrida, ‘such inheritance cannot be accomplished through pious conservation but only through critical discrimination’.^[10] I seek the same in my reading of Kierkegaard and insist that many contemporary Kierkegaard scholars are wholly concerned with the task of pious conservation and have little mind for the task of critical discrimination. Michael Strawser has brilliantly referred to these scholars as ‘Kierkegaardiologist’, and in many ways the ethos of this project is to avoid the task of Kierkegaardiology at all cost. While this sort of scholarship aims to defend Kierkegaard from the encroachment of secular philosophy and political theory, I aim instead to bring the insights of Kierkegaard to bear on the field of contemporary philosophy and, in particular, the fields of ontology, subjectivity and the political.

Along with this method of interpretation, it is necessary to briefly mention the issue of pseudonymous authorship. In simplest terms, I more or less follow the reading of John Elrod who has argued:

My reading of the pseudonyms has convinced me that, in spite of his polemics against philosophical speculation, he has intentionally developed and submerged in his pseudonyms an ontology which philosophically accounts for the vast topography of human existence described in the major portions of his pseudonyms.^[11]

Following Elrod, this book will contend that among the variety of voices and styles that make up Kierkegaard’s authorship, these pseudonyms all share an underlying philosophical system. The differences of these texts has more to do with the perspective of the author than they do with differing philosophical systems. Rather than highlight the problem of philosophical speculation as such, the voices of the pseudonyms represent the problem of perspective and, in particular, the limits of language. Michael Strawser has highlighted this issue as such:

In my view, a Kierkegaardian pseudonym is a humorous signification that a particular work is infected with the problem of language, which is, admittedly, not so easily grasped, if it is graspable at all.^[12]

I am thus committed to a reading in which the pseudonyms do not pose a problem to a systematic interpretation of Kierkegaard’s authorship but rather represent the limits of language along with showing a variety of perspectival responses to the same ontological structure. In a sense, we could say that Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms exemplify a variety of parallax views of the same fundamental ontological structure.

This book will proceed as follows:

In chapter 1, ‘Idealism Before Kierkegaard’, I aim to accomplish two goals, each one related to one of the dual aims of the work as a whole. In one respect I am arguing that one cannot attempt a systematic and philosophical interpretation of the work of Kierkegaard without placing his authorship against the background of German idealism. Through this historical analysis, I show how much of the systematic character of Kierkegaard’s thought necessitates taking seriously the influence of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. With Fichte, Kierkegaard provides an account, and subsequent critique of, subjective immediacy and self-positing, eventually arguing that the self is the very contradiction between a finite and infinite element. With Schelling, Kierkegaard attempts to focus on the concept of actuality, in his case meaning that the project of systematic philosophy can never simply begin from any sort of pre-experiential logical grounds. Finally, following Hegel, Kierkegaard follows the systematic structure of a logic grounded in a movement inaugurated through contradiction.

In another respect, this emphasis on placing Kierkegaard in an idealist context allows me to situate Kierkegaard in the context of contemporary materialism, much of which consists of a materialist re-articulation of the German idealist tradition. Thus, I end the chapter by briefly outlining the manner in which contemporary materialism has come to re-appropriate the projects of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel by identifying the materialist core in each of their idealist projects.

Chapters 2 and 3 follow the account of idealism given in chapter 1 to outline a systematic structure at the heart of Kierkegaard’s authorship. Chapter 2, ‘Anxiety and Ontology’, identifies the implicit ontological structure at the heart of Kierkegaard’s project through an analysis of his work The Concept of Anxiety. By approaching this text through considering the ontological implications of his critique of immediacy as it is found in idealist philosophy, I highlight the manner in which the founding moment of Kierkegaard’s systematic thought is neither the certainty of the absolute self-positing subject nor the certainty of the existence of an objective truth such as God. Rather, the founding moment of Kierkegaard’s project, and more importantly existence, is the anxious awareness of the abyss that infinitely precedes all existential projects and logical systems.

After outlining these ontological grounds, I move on to analyse how this ontology of the Afgrund [abyss] leads Kierkegaard to emphasize a particular notion of freedom. In this notion, freedom is never just a pure and absolute freedom but instead is a dynamic entanglement of opposed elements. This entanglement signifies the fact that the particular human being always relates to the infinite and finite aspects in her self, while then relating herself to the finite and infinite aspects of the external world.

This same tension carries over in my discussion of good and evil in which I emphasize both the element of contingency at the heart of the self and reality in Kierkegaard’s work, while also showing the ethical and social implications of this emphasis. From here I make one of the most explicit conceptual developments in the work by arguing for what I call the fractured dialectic at the heart of Kierkegaard’s project. I outline a clear ontological project that consists of a dialectical structure that is inherently fractured by the pure contingency of the abyss [Afgrund]. This dialectic neither begins from a position of absolute unity nor aims at an eventual synthesis. I conclude the chapter with some initial remarks on the social and political possibilities of this ontology.

Chapter 3, ‘Spirit and Society’, builds on the ontological foundation outlined in the previous chapter to exemplify how this ontological structure leads to the emergence of a particular form of consciousness through the development of freedom or spirit. While developing an anthropology that builds upon the previously outlined ontology, this chapter also brings up the crucial question of whether or not it is possible to have a non-theological reading of Kierkegaard that does not ignore foundational aspects of his thought. To accomplish this, I consider the implications of an ontological interpretation of God that allows me to avoid falling back into the theological. I argue that God can signify pure ontological possibility, and that the properly religious mode of existence has to do with relating to existential projects in a mode of possibility. This then leads to a consideration of both deconstructive and materialist attempts that have previously been made to reckon with the theological aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought. I conclude this chapter by considering the connection between the psychological and the social, which further outlines how the ontology and anthropology outlined in chapters 2 and 3 opens a political interpretation of Kierkegaard’s thought.

Chapter 4 follows the progression from the ontological, to the anthropological, to the social by directly addressing the political aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought. By taking the conceptual claims made thus far and applying them to one of Kierkegaard’s only overtly political texts, Two Ages, I am able to draw out more precisely what a Kierkegaardian political ontology would look like. Along with this, I argue that, for Kierkegaard, existence never boils down to an either/or choice between the single individual or the social collective but rather, that a proper collective necessitates self-relating individuals, and that properly relational individuals must relate to projects external to their own subjectivity.

In chapter 5 I make a shift from focusing wholly on the project of Kierkegaard to considering the development of recent materialist philosophies and the manner in which they relate to the previously outlined fractured dialectic. I begin with an analysis of the late work of Jean-Paul Sartre, focusing on the manner in which his materialist project both prefigures much of recent European materialism and shares an uncanny resemblance to the political reading of Kierkegaard outlined in the previous chapter. After this I consider the project of one of Sartre’s intellectual heirs, Alain Badiou. Through considering the ontology, theory of subjectivity and political aims of Badiou’s philosophical system, I argue that his philosophy ends up being the most thoroughly Kierkegaardian of the contemporary materialists. This chapter concludes by using the ontological and political reading of Kierkegaard developed throughout this work to offer a critical corrective to contemporary materialist philosophy. It is my contention that Kierkegaard’s ability to theorize both the internal constitution and external activity of the subject provides a useful framework for a brand of materialism that often risks forgetting the individual human subject.

I conclude the work by briefly considering the concept of love, which serves as the crucial trope in the work I argue represents the final moment in Kierkegaard’s systematic project, Works of Love. It is my contention that love acts as the unsynthesizable concept which serves as the infinite grounds on both sides of his fractured dialectic and which allows Kierkegaard to be considered in relation to both the Christian tradition and contemporary materialism, which has also placed emphasis on the ontological and political importance of love as an orienting concept. Overall this book aims to present a systematic picture of Kierkegaard’s thought that places him in dialogue with both nineteenth-century idealism and twenty-first-century materialism for the sake of casting new light on the social and political relevance of his unique brand of religious existentialism.

Notes

For Slavoj Žižek, see The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), and Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano. (London: Continuum, 2009). Meillassoux’s comment comes from personal correspondence with the author on 2 October 2010 via email.

Žižek, The Parallax View, 75.

John Milbank, ‘The Sublime in Kierkegaard’, The Heythrop Journal 38 (1996), 298–321, 304.

Ibid., 303.

It is important to note that Milbank himself is not making any argument for a materialist reading, as his ontological reading depends on a theological ontology still grounded in a form of divine transcendence.

Steven Shakespeare, ‘Kierkegaard and Postmodernity’ in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, eds. George Pattison and John Lippitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 472.

Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008).

Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 82.

Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 12.

10.

Ibid.

11.

John W. Elrod, Being and Existence in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, 6.

12.

Michael Strawser, Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard from Irony to Edification (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 94.

↑ Back to top