ABSTRACT
Scholars have explored in depth both Kierkegaard’s religious epistemology and his understanding of revelation but have not often considered the two together. Steven Emmanuel’s monograph Kierkegaard and the Concept of Revelation is a bright exception. Emmanuel attempts to supplant “the popular conception of Kierkegaard as an irrationalist” with the notion that he was a “suprarationalist” in his view of revelation. Kierkegaard used the language of paradox to counter the Hegelian subordination of the language of faith to philosophical conceptuality. The uniqueness of Emmanuel’s argument lies in his juxtaposition of Kierkegaard’s “suprarational account of revelation” with a “pragmatic account of the justification of religious belief.” Emmanuel intends to complicate the notion that Kierkegaard paved the way for “the Derridean critique of the metaphysics of presence.”Emmanuel’s argument raises the debate as to how Derrida and poststructuralism should be understood.
