ABSTRACT
Bartholomew Ryan's project hinges on two interconnected theses that render Soren Kierkegaard's political views not only consistent but unsettlingly prescient. "Crucial to Ryan's approach is the insistence not only on the fragmented, incomplete, ambiguous, ironic, and polymorphous character of the Kierkegaardian subject, but also on Kierkegaard's idiosyncratic writing practices which combine a baroque pseudonymity with the straightforward edifying strategies of religious discourse. According to Ryan, one of Kierkegaard's key affinities with Walter Benjamin lies in his conflicted urbanity. Ryan shows why Theodor Adorno's own "negative dialectic," rooted in endless insistence on discontinuity and fragmentation, owes a lot to Kierkegaard's "dialectic of disintegration." Ryan's achievement is to document the paradox of Georg Lukacs' reification of Kierkegaard's dynamic self, while seeking to emancipate the individual from the shackles of capitalist domination. In this way, Lukacs "destroys any ambiguity of Kierkegaard's inwardness and turns it into the totality of Marxism." Kierkegaard's Indirect Politics has several noteworthy merits.
