ABSTRACT
The book’s identification of the religious enthusiasm of faith with the insanity of the madman may therefore appear jarring: the man of faith is indeed insane, religious passion has detached him from worldly rationality; however, many contemporary readers have misinterpreted what this means, reproaching Kierkegaard for gleefully embracing faith as irrational, which carries obvious dangers. For Nancy, experience is a question of existence, of going, living, making it through something: “existence is experience.” Kierkegaard’s poetics of faith consists in staging the confrontation between two forms-of-life and thus two ways-of-experiencing: between Abraham, who has faith, and Johannes de Silentio, Fear and Trembling’s pseudonymous author, who does not. Fear and Trembling offers a description of the form of faith, from Johannes’ position of unfaith.
