Kierkegaard and the Ends of Language (Electronic book text)

What do we read when we read Kierkegaard? How do we know? Insisting that Kierkegaard remains a far more enigmatic and paradoxical writer than is often assumed, Geoffrey A. Hale argues that the best way to approach Kierkegaards work and understand its significance for our own thought is to retrace its formative influence on major intellectuals of the early twentieth century. In mutually reflective readings of Kierkegaards foundational texts through the work of three pivotal authorsFranz Kafka, Theodor Adorno, and Rainer Maria RilkeHale shows how each of these writers draws attention to the unwavering sense of human finitude that pervades all of Kierkegaards work and, with it, the profoundly unsettling indeterminacy in which it results. It is the very limitations of language, Hale argues, that hold it open to meaning, to interpretation, and thus to freedom. Resisting clear circumscription in this way, Kierkegaards work becomes all the more fruitful to usand all the more challengingto the extent that it resists our understanding.