International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (2005) 58: 125–128 © Springer 2005

DOI: 10.1007/s11153-005-0104-9

Book review

Elsebet Jegstrup (ed.). The New Kierkegaard. Bloomington, IN:

Indiana University Press, 2004. xii + 266 pages. $24.95

This volume of essays provides a useful supplement to an ear-

lier attempt (see Kierkegaard and Post/Modernity, ed. Matustik and
Westphal, 1995) to apply to Kierkegaard’s writings the insights of
post-modernity (or contemporary Continental philosophy), but whereas
only some of the essays in the earlier work were deconstructive in
approach, all of the essays in this new volume claim to be. Just
as interesting as this exclusive focus is the editor’s claim that these
essays “at the same time demonstrate that deconstruction is not one
thing” (5). It is precisely this diversity about what constitutes decon-
structive readings and their status that may clarify what is at stake
in the current debate about whether such readings are appropriate
to Kierkegaard’s writings. Various levels of “deconstruction” are pro-
posed in these essays, offering different levels of challenge to tra-
ditional (“logocentric”) readings. Some of the formulations of the
activity and goal of deconstruction are hardly threatening: e.g., “A
deconstructive reading of K’s texts . . . emphasizes his indirect com-
munication” (4–5); one of deconstuction’s “most essential heuristic
claims” is to “make visible the textual complexity” (69); “good decon-
struction has . . . led to a sharpening of a focus on the text as text,
or on the textuality of the text itself” (69). Even the more radical
idea that “the inner contradictions, blind spots, rhetorical games, nar-
ratives, metaphors, and allegories of the text are made into a kind of
hermeneutic of suspicion that believes just as little in the innocence of
a text as in the trustworthiness of the author” (69) should not surprise
anyone who has paid attention to how Kierkegaard has Johannes Cli-
macus respond to a review of Philosophical Fragments that misses all
the “irony,” “parody,” and “satire” at work in the text. Insofar as
Kierkegaard used literary devices and strategies, his texts invite decon-
structive readings. Moreover, insofar as these readings are addressed
to Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous texts, as many of these are, such read-
ings are unlikely to provoke anyone. Garff and Poole, e.g., however
radical a reputation they have, provide insights into Either-Or that one
126 BOOK REVIEW

can only find helpful. Such interrogation of the text seems like good
literary analysis. What is more provocative, however, is the claim that
all of Kierkegaard’s writings invite deconstructive readings – as Rum-
ble puts it, “undermining the authority and coherence of the narrative
voice, then, is a tactic common to both pseudonymous and verony-
mous [signed] works” (164). The essays by Jegstrup, Gibbs, and Rum-
ble, for example, bring Works of Love under the same searchlight of
literary analysis as Either-Or and Fear and Trembling. What is pro-
vocative is the claim that there is no distinction between indirect and
direct communication – all the texts only communicate indirectly – or
the claim that ‘S. Kierkegaard’ is the twelfth pseudonym (74). How-
ever, even this challenge is mitigated when it is claimed that decon-
structive readings can never insist on being “dominant readings” (2)
and when it is denied that “logocentric approaches to reading texts
are somehow illegitimate” (3).
The volume has a two-sided task – both to show (1) that decon-
struction is not the bête noire it is sometimes made out to be (rel-
ativistic, nihilistic, reductive, precluding ethical decisiveness), and to
show (2) that Kierkegaard’s texts are literarily complex, and that a
deconstructive approach to them “appears to reach deeper into the
complexities of his texts, unfolds them, considers the intricacies of
his thinking – pseudonyms, communication devices, ironies – exam-
ines the many meanings of them” (3). Caputo, e.g., defends Derri-
dean deconstruction as more like Kierkegaard’s ‘religious’ than his
‘aesthetic’; “undecidability is not indecision but the ongoing condi-
tion of possibility of decision demanding the constant renewal of deci-
sion” (17). Other essayists spend more time exposing the aporias in
Kierkegaard’s texts – e.g., re-reading Either-Or as not presenting a
choice between ethics and aesthetics, but rather as problematizing the
connection between them (Wood), or suggesting that Judge William’s
critique is out-of-sync with the presentation of the aesthete (Garff).
While some of the articles attempt to show affinities between
Kierkegaard and Derridean deconstruction (e.g., Dooley), or make even
the stronger claim that Kierkegaard “begins the deconstructive project”
and Derrida is a welcome reiteration (8), Caputo’s analysis is espe-
cially interesting for its attention to the decisive differences between
the two thinkers. Admitting that both Kierkegaard and Derrida “stake
everything on the need to decide in the midst of undecidability,” Cap-
uto goes on to contrast them sharply in terms of Socratic irony: “For
the Christian Socrates, irony and humor are strategies and incognitos,
whereas for a more deconstructive Socrates irony is not a strategy but
 BOOK REVIEW 127

an inescapable condition” (25); Kierkegaard’s understanding of the con-

trast between Christianity and Christendom implies a “certain struc-
tural limit of irony” that is not found in Derrida (33). He explains: “In
Derrida’s logic of undecidability, decision does not assume the binary
dimension of a clear Either-Or where one of the alternatives is clearly
to be excluded ”; “for Derrida, ‘the god’ can always and in principle be
determined otherwise” (24–25).
The volume raises the question for me of the consequences of the
claim that “deconstruction is not one thing” (5). First, are there different
kinds of consequences for ethics depending on different kinds of decon-
struction? On the one hand, Gibbs’s exquisite analysis concentrates on
“two small words and one punctuation mark,” but in the service of ask-
ing the much bigger question whether ethics can “perform commanding,
and remain ethical” (153); Jegstrup, on the other hand, doubts whether
Works of Love is an ethic at all since it is “not a theory of love or even
a theory of the works of love” (81). Second, is there any kind of decon-
struction that does not level all of Kierkegaard’s writings, so that there is
no contrast between direct and indirect communication, between signed
and pseudonymous – and is such leveling in tension with the emphasis
on the literary strategies of indirect communication and pseudonym-
ity? Third, I remain a little unclear about what is most objectionable
in traditional readings. On the one hand, Jegstrup suggests that inter-
pretation grounded in ‘logocentrism’ “ignores how Kierkegaard under-
stands existence” and that Kierkegaard’s deconstructive approach, with
its “various forms of communication devices,” “ironic discourse” and
“multiple pseudonyms” attempts to “engender self-knowledge in the
reader and, perhaps, in Kierkegaard himself”(1). Is this a different kind
of deconstruction from Garff’s in which Kierkegaard is “lifted free of
the jargon of authenticity and reinserted into the labyrinth of his own
writings” and “no longer perceived as an oracle for existentialism (69).
And what is at stake in learning to read so that “Kierkegaard is no
longer perceived as an oracle for existentialism but read as an author
who explicates problems that branch out into the most diverse regions
of modernity” (69)? Insofar as existentialist thinkers are opposed to
the logocentrism and totalization of rationalism, insofar as they focus
on singularity and otherness and undecidability, it seems that they too
explicate “problems that branch out into the most diverse regions of
modernity.” Perhaps the worry is that popular “existentialism” takes
things too seriously to be deconstructionist. But many of the essays in
this volume intend to show that deconstruction also takes things seri-
ously – it is against objectifying or reducing the unnameable; it affirms
128 BOOK REVIEW

the aporias of existence that defy explanation. Or perhaps it is pre-

cisely the moral seriousness of deconstructionism (Caputo) that wants
to be shed of the genealogy of “existentialism.” Finally, the editor’s
introduction formulates the project in terms of a dichotomy between
“logocentrism” (method-bound and exclusive) and “deconstruc-
tion”(open to the other), but this may be a false dichotomy which
so widens the term “deconstruction” as to be practically useless. The
intended contrast seems to be between ‘rational’ (analytic) philosophy,
and continental philosophy, but it is not clear to me that ‘deconstruc-
tion’ and ‘continental philosophy’ are the same thing, nor that any-
thing non-deconstructionist is necessarily analytical. These reservations
notwithstanding, I highly recommend the volume – it needs to be stud-
ied by anyone working on Kierkegaard.
M. Jamie Ferreira
University of Virginia