ABSTRACT
This book is about Magister Adler only in a certain sense, the sense in which he is a Phenomenon, a transparence through which the age is caught, in its confusion about the concept of a religious revelation and its occlusion of the concept of religious authority. Since Adler's derangements mirror those of his fellow ministers, Cavell further suggests that, for Kierkegaard, Adler is also an epigram on the Christendom of his age, a terse and ingenious expression of it. As Cavell summarises the matter, a dialectical examination of a concept shows how the meaning of that concept changes. An art-critical commonplace to regard mid-twentieth century artistic modernism as outmoded or dead, as having been theoretically and practically outflanked by what might be called postmodernist modes of artistic endeavour in which the artist's relation to the history of their enterprise appears to be an eminently dismissable problem.
