ABSTRACT
Roger Poole’s book, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication, is, of course, a direct communication. Its thesis may be seen in the colon which marks the connection between Kierkegaard and the indirect communication, for his argument is not about the pseudonymous authorship, which by itself is but one half of the first form of indirect communication, nor yet about the two-streamed authorship concluded with that oversized Postscript, nor yet about the entire authorship, but extends to the man himself-the one whose spine may have been bent as a question-mark to his age: which is ours. ‘What seems a mere problem of methodology is in fact a statement about the lived body in ethical space’ (1). According to Poole ‘indirect communication’ has multiple significances. First, it refers to the communication made up of ‘the aesthetic and the edifying stream of texts’ (9). While this was Kierkegaard’s modus communicandi his body was his own-he could deploy it as a ‘part in that chain of doubly reflected communications’ (18). This body is largely unproblematic, ‘largely uncommmented upon, and was certainly not sketched’ (17).
