ABSTRACT
The reasons for the book’s force as privileged intellectual fodder for a conversation about Kierkegaard and deconstruction—and perhaps Kierkegaard and the discourse of postmodernism more generally—are legion; but perhaps none so important as indicated paradigmatically in the quotation marks within which the term “chatter” is nearly always placed throughout Peter Fenves’ text. Fenves’ study of the production of meaning in Kierkegaard belongs to a tradition in the scholarly reception of Kierkegaard dedicated to providing a corrective to what Roger Poole has referred to as “blunt reading,” that is, "that kind of reading that refuses, as a matter of principle, to accord a literary status to the text; that refuses the implications of the pseudonymous technique; that misses the irony". "Chatter" is not a frequently cited work, and there are no major direct responses to it in the secondary literature.
