ABSTRACT

Soren Kierkegaard's writings began, he says in The Point of View, with Either/Or, a pseudonymous work by 'Victor Eremita'. He goes on to list his works, up to what he thinks of as the pivotal moment of Concluding Unscientific Postscript. After that, he says, come only the religious writings, for in 1847 – the year of The Communist Manifesto's assessment of bourgeois culture – he began his critique of 'Christendom'. Kierkegaard has stated precisely the power mechanisms that activate nineteenth-century Christendom: Christendom equals the Panopticon. However casually voiced, Kierkegaard's desire to be a policeman maps the commentator on Christendom onto the realist novelist of the nineteenth century – who is also like the policeman in his surveillance of a whole society. In particular, it links him to Charles Dickens in Bleak House, a work of the same moment as the Kierkegaard, which is also interested in trying to chart an amorphous system as extensive as a textual system.