Kierkegaard and Political Theory

Søren Kierkegaard's radical protestant philosophy of the individual—in which a person's leap of faith is favored over general ethics—has become a model for many contemporary political theorists. Thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou have drawn on its revolutionary spirit to position truth above the constraints of political systems. In Kierkegaard and Political Theory, contributors from a wide range of disciplines—including theology, sociology, philosophy, and aesthetics—examine just how crucial Kierkegaard's anti-institutional thinking has been to such efforts and to modernity as a whole. The contributors convincingly position Kierkegaard's radical philosophy as the starting point for contemporary political theory. They show how he pioneered a modernity defined as an argument—an experience—of the impossibility of rationally comprehending a system of thinking. They show how religious and aesthetic experiences function as a response to this impossibility, how their coherence in politics must always be questioned, especially in history's extreme example: totalitarianism. Engaging this and many other subjects, they provide a compelling new line in Kierkegaard studies that illuminates new contours of our political thought. Armen Avanessian is founder of the research platform Speculative Poetics at the Free University Berlin. Sophie Wennerscheid is professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Ghent.