ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of Madalina Diaconu's volume, On the Edge of the Abyss. The book offers a short history of its nineteenth-century Romantic and post-Romantic expressions. Next, it draws a nuanced tableau of the theme at hand. Further, Diaconu discovers traces of the nihilist constellation in Kierkegaard's The Concept of Irony, Either/Or, Part One, Repetition, Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, and The Sickness unto Death. It deals with the allegedly latent nihilism in both Kierkegaard's biography and theology. The volume ends with an applied analysis of three, specifically nihilistic, motifs without substantial reference to Kierkegaard. Diaconu develops three kinds of nihilism in Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works: the aesthetic, the ironic, and the demonic. Still, for Diaconu, Kierkegaard seems to get to the crux of the nihilistic phenomenon in his multifaceted discussion of the demonic. On the Edge of the Abyss constitutes a cornerstone in the Romanian reception of Kierkegaard's thought.
