The draw of the absolute: Kierkegaard's apophatic thought

This dissertation attempts to illuminate some central concepts in Kierkegaard's thought in relation to two primary coordinates of interpretation: German idealism and Neoplatonic apophatic theology. It shows how Kierkegaard creates his basic philosophical and theological categories through appropriation and inversion of idealist, and particularly Hegelian, categories---e.g., spirit, existence, the moment, the absolute. Kierkegaard inhabits the conceptual edifice of idealism but brings about its ruination through the exposure of its concepts to a radical, non-sublatable form of negation. The resultant discourse maintains a structural filiation with apophatic theology, a form of thought which was itself the object of a prior appropriation by idealism.;Part one argues that Kierkegaard's reprise of apophatic thought is legible in his critique of ontotheology---the idea, justified through the ontological argument, that it is possible to delimit God under the category of being. Such delimitation is the condition for the possibility of the knowability and articulability of the divine. Critical of this, Kierkegaard maintains an idea of God as the absolutely different, as unknowable and beyond being. In this regard, I explore Kierkegaard's relation to Jacobi, Kant, Hegel and Schelling. I argue that Kierkegaard's criticism of idealism does not ground itself in a conception of the finitude of thought or existence, but rather upon a properly apophatic notion of the infinite.;Part two articulates a denser set of theological filiations between Kierkegaard and Neoplatonic apophatic thought---in particular, the thought of Eckhart. The primary concept explored is that of God as "infinite reduplication." This apophatic concept, which expresses a logic of identity and difference, has its origin in the Neoplatonic idea of procession and return, and its renegade, kataphatic equivalent in the Hegelian concept of "mediation." Recovered in Kierkegaard with apophatic signification, it inscribes a logic of overflow or excess into the very concept of God. In particular, it thinks divine manifestation as ungrounded movement, as standing in relation to a withdrawn source. On this basis, Kierkegaard affirms, contra Hegel, the coincidence of divine manifestation and divine hiddenness.