ABSTRACT
Milan Petkanic has been an important voice in the Slovak discourse about Kierkegaard, and his monograph Søren Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Passion has contributed to its liveliness. The book is an enlarged version of Petkanic's dissertation, which he defended at the Philosophical Faculty of the Comenius University in Bratislava in 2007. The first part of Petkanic's monograph makes its point of departure from Kierkegaard's juxtaposition of an age full of passionate enthusiasm (the age of revolution) and an age characterized by passionlessness (the present age). The second part concentrates on the self-formation of the individual, on the processes of becoming and the choice of oneself. The third part presents the religious dimension of Kierkegaard's theory of the self, the commitment of an accepting and corrective love for one's neighbor, and the challenge of a relation to a transcendence that manifests itself, yet remains ungraspable. The concluding part shows that Petkanic is concerned not only with a conceptual reconstruction of Kierkegaard's thought-project.
