| This study examines Soren Kierkegaard's authorship as a Christian pedagogy, or catechism. Indirect communication, the unique rhetorical strategy operative in both his pseudonymous and veronymous texts, allows Kierkegaard to engage his reader in a multi-perspectival investigation into what it means to be a person and a Christian. Because this maieutics is indirect, a crucial level of signification occurs in the exchanges between Kierkegaard's texts and their reader, in the "experience" of reading Kierkegaard. Looking closely at how these texts produce meaning can generate new possibilities for what they can be read to say. Using the interpretive resources of rhetorical analysis, reception theory, reader response theory, and deconstruction allows this instructional experience to be understood critically, and shows that Kierkegaard's indirection is not merely a formal or generic problem of communicative method, but that it also enunciates a fundamental and distinctly Christian anthropological position that extends beyond his substantive arguments concerning truth and selfhood.;Kierkegaard's Christian definition of the self combats the anthrocentric subjectivities of Romanticism and Idealism, which hold that the self develops its individual truth through the accretion and expression of knowledge and experience. For Kierkegaard, this theory is an aesthetic untruth. Upbuilding becomes his term for the apophatic process by which we learn through an increasingly ironic consciousness that our subjectivity is a fragmented composite of necessity and possibility, and is realized as a unity only in acts that emulate Christ's agapic love. Kierkegaard's authorship itself can be seen to be such a loving act toward his reader so that he or she may see the possibility of faith.;Finally, Kierkegaard shares with various postmodern theorists an abiding interest in the troubled connections of truth, language, and subjectivity. In examining Paul de Man's late work on Kierkegaard and irony, we find the presence and salience of Kierkegaard's radical and disturbing lessons. |
