ABSTRACT
What might it mean to ‘deconstruct’ Kierkegaard? From one point of view it would produce a reading not only allowed for but actively pre-empted by much of what Kierkegaard wrote. His entire pseudonymous production-the ‘aesthetic’, that is, as opposed to the ‘religious’ writing-can be seen to deconstruct itself at every turn, remaining always one jump ahead of the hypocrite lecteur who thinks to have fathomed its meaning. According to his own retrospective account (in The Point of View for My Work as an Author), Kierkegaard was wholly in command of this process from the outset. His ‘aesthetic’ production was a means of ensnaring the reader in fictions and speculative arguments which would ultimately selfdeconstruct, so to speak, at the point of transition to a higher, ethical plane of understanding. The reader would thus be brought to comprehend the inherent limitations and self-imposed deceits of a purely aesthetic attitude to life. This ‘ethical’ stage would in turn be transcended by a recognition of its own insufficiency in the face of religious experience. Such is the threefold dialectic of enlightenment as Kierkegaard expressly defines it. From the standpoint thus gained atop all the shifting perspectives of Kierkegaard’s authorship, the reader will achieve that inwardness of self-understanding which alone constitutes religious faith.
