ABSTRACT
Ellul’s most substantial piece on Kierkegaard is found not in one of his own books, but rather in the preface to Nelly Viallaneix’s Écoute, Kierkegaard: Essai sur la communication de la parole. Here Ellul claims that he writes about Kierkegaard neither as a philosopher nor as a specialist but rather “as a mere reader of Kierkegaard and as a simple player.”14 Based on Ellul’s own approach to Kierkegaard, he finds it intriguing that Kierkegaard is studied as a philosopher by philosophers. Ellul writes: “I hardly understand what philosophers would write about Kierkegaard. When I read Kierkegaard, I feel the ground floor. A man speaks to me. When I read most of the commentators, I am perplexed, because I do not recognize anything in the Kierkegaard that I think I have met.”15 Ellul acknowledges that philosophers may accurately trace a criticism of Hegel in Kierkegaard’s writing and point out how Kierkegaard differs from other existential philosophers, but Ellul believes that Kierkegaard requires his
6 Jacques Ellul, L’espérance oubliée, Paris: Gallimard 1972. (English translation: Hope in the Time of Abandonment, trans. by C. Edward Hopkin, New York: Seabury Press 1973.) 7 Jacques Ellul, Éthique de la liberté, vol. I, Geneva: Labor et Fides 1973 and Les combats de la liberté (Éthique de la liberté, vol. 3), Geneva: Labor et Fides 1984. (English translation: The Ethics of Freedom, trans. and ed. by Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans 1976.) 8 Jacques Ellul, “Preface,” in Nelly Viallaneix, Écoute, Kierkegaard: Essai sur la communication de la parole, vol. 1, Paris: Cerf 1979. 9 Jacques Ellul, La foi au prix du doute: “Encore quarante jours…” Paris: Hachette 1980. (English translation: Living Faith: Belief and Doubt in a Perilous World, trans. by Peter Heinegg, San Francisco: Harper & Row 1983.) 10 Jacques Ellul, La Parole humiliée, Paris: Seuil 1981. (English translation: The Humiliation of the Word, trans. by Joyce Main Hanks, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans 1985.) 11 Jacques Ellul, La subversion du christianisme, Paris: Seuil 1984. (English translation: The Subversion of Christianity, trans. by Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans 1986.) 12 Jacques Ellul, La raison d’être: Meditation sur l’Ecclésiaste, Paris: Seuil 1987. (English translation: Reason for Being: A Meditation on Ecclesiastes, trans. by Joyce Main Hanks, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans 1990.) 13 Jacques Ellul, Le bluff technologie, Paris: Hachette 1988. (English translation: The Technological Bluff, trans. by Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans 1990.) 14 Ellul, “Preface,” in Viallaneix, Écoute, Kierkegaard: Essai sur la communication de
reader to read everything or else understand nothing. For one may find a single work of Kierkegaard’s “interesting,” but still miss the point of the text, since “for the most part, it is the link, the report, the correlation, the contradiction between all the texts,” which reveals the meaning and purpose of each text.16
