Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy: A Fractured Dialectic [Hardcover]

S?ren Kierkegaard is often cast as the forefather of existentialism and an anti-Hegelian proponent of the single individual. Yet this book calls these traditional characterizations into question by arguing that Kierkegaard offers not only a systematic critique of idealist philosophy, but more surprisingly, a political ontology that is paradoxically at home in the context of twenty-first-century philosophical and political thought.

Through a close consideration of his authorship in the context of nineteenth-century German idealism, Michael O'Neill Burns argues that Kierkegaard develops an ontology, anthropology and theory of the political that are outcomes of his critical appropriation of the philosophical projects of Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte. While starting out in the philosophical concerns of the nineteenth century, the book offers an interpretation of Kierkegaard that shows his relevance to philosophers and political theorists in the twenty-first century.

Burns presents us with a radical, political, materialist Kierkegaard. His argument is bold, counter-intuitive - and utterly persuasive. This book deserves to set the agenda for Kierkegaard studies for years to come. Steven Shakespeare, Liverpool Hope University

Michael Burns, in his magisterial Kierkegaard and the Matter of Philosophy, achieves nothing less than doing for Kierkegaard what Slavoj }i~ek has done for Hegel. While remaining faithful to core components of Kierkegaards philosophy, Burns sweeps aside accumulated received readings of him and constructs in their place the figure of a Kierkegaard deeply and undeniably relevant to todays philosophical landscape as colored by innovative revivals of the legacies of German idealism and Marxism. Burns's transcendental materialist Kierkeló+