How to Read Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard is one of the prophets of the contemporary age, a man whose acute observations on modern European life might have been written yesterday, whose work anticipated fundamental developments in psychoanalysis, philosophy, theology, and the critique of mass culture by more than a century.

John D. Caputo offers a compelling account of Kierkegaard as a thinker of particular relevance in our postmodern times, who set off a revolution that counts Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida among its heirs. His conceptions of truth as a self-transforming “deed” and his haunting account of the “single individual” seem to have been written especially with us in mind.

Extracts include Kierkegaard’s classic reading of the story of Abraham and Isaac, the revolutionary theory that truth is subjectivity, and his groundbreaking analysis of modern bourgeois life.

Intent upon letting the reader experience the pleasure and intellectual stimulation in reading classic authors, the How to Read series will facilitate and enrich your understanding of texts vital to the canon.

John D. Caputo is the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion and Humanities at Syracuse University and a specialist in the interface between postmodern thought and contemporary religion. His latest books are The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event and After the Death of God, coauthored with Gianni Vattimo. He is also the author of On Religion.

Simon Critchley is a professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research, and at the University of Essex, Colchester. His many books include Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity and, most recently, The Book of Dead Philosophers.