How to read Kierkegaard

John D. Caputo, Simon Critchley9780393330786, 0393330788

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.
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.