Kierkegaard and Politics: Society, Subjectivity, and the Self

Widely recognized as the “father of existentialism,” and famous for his stinging religious critique of Christendom, Søren Kierkegaard was also a deeply political thinker—if seldom recognized as such. In texts ranging from Fear and Trembling to Works of Love, he develops a robust picture of authentic subjectivity that speaks directly to the challenge of navigating existence in an age of mass media, uncertain truths, and trivialities capable of assuming identity-defining proportions. His witty, incisive 19th-century responses to relentless headlines, the social flattening of identity, and the affective power of crowds resonate powerfully with our own 21st-century experience. How does one develop an authentic self amidst the incessant chatter of social media? How might the achievement of an inward authenticity come to bear on one’s political subjectivity? How should one seek to discern and relate to truth, objectively or subjectively?

In this course, we will read widely within Kierkegaard’s heterogeneous body of work—including lesser known texts like The Present Age and The Corsair Affair—as we explore key concepts like inwardness, levelling, equality, the single individual, and indirect communication. While we will focus most of our reading on Kierkegaard himself (the master of indirect communication), we will also have occasion to consider his political intersections with later thinkers like Georg Lukács and Slavoj Žižek, among others.