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ix Introduction Jeffrey Hanson Kierkegaard and the History of Phenomenology During April 1928, the Kiev-born philosopher Lev Shestov, then making his home in France and teaching at the Sorbonne, attended a conference in Amsterdam where he met Edmund Husserl, with whom he would maintain a cordial friendship for many years. He had already published on Husserl and indeed was instrumental in introducing Husserl to France, and Husserl, despite disagreements with him, had taken an interest in his intense polemical thought, which vigorously protested against the imperialism of reason and protected the unique privileges of religious faith. Husserl had assumed that Shestov was inspired by Kierkegaard , but Shestov confessed that he did not know the Dane’s work. Shestov recalled that Husserl then practically forced him to read Kierkegaard ; this was not a dispassionate suggestion, it was an insistence. Shestov would later argue that one cannot properly understand Husserl without coming to grips with his enthusiasm for Kierkegaard.1 This incident, the source of some understandable surprise and speculation, is perhaps the first noteworthy one in a series of encounters between Kierkegaard and the founding figures of the phenomenological movement. The second is doubtless Heidegger’s extensive dependence upon Kierkegaard, remarked upon by Husserl to Shestov. Heidegger himself was less apt to acknowledge this debt, relegating Kierkegaard instead to the category of a psychologist or religious thinker, a dismissal that surely belies the depth of Heidegger’s borrowings and betrays his discomfort with his underappreciated source.2 The exact nature of Kierkegaard’s influence is under ongoing discussion, but it is quite clear that Heidegger could not have thought through thrownness, anxiety, truth, or subjectivity in the way he did without the Dane. Emmanuel Levinas would later say that he felt Heidegger had imparted to Kierkegaard philosophical seriousness, especially with respect to the importance of feeling, a longneglected topic in respectable philosophical circles.3 x I N T R O D U C T I O N Yet Levinas’s relationship with Kierkegaard is surely just as ambivalent as Heidegger’s. Often Levinas was sharply critical, attacking what he perceived to be Kierkegaard’s violence and immodesty and his attempts to transcend the ethical.4 At the same time he repeatedly expressed appreciation for Kierkegaard’s efforts at resisting totality and praised his novel understandings of belief and truth.5 Even while accusing him of egotism, Levinas acknowledges that he had the most rigorous phenomenology of faith possible,6 so recent scholarship on the ambivalent relation between these two thinkers is surely right to argue that Levinas cannot be read as having merely dismissed Kierkegaard without having also surreptitiously or not so surreptitiously borrowed from him as well.7 Derrida’s retrieval of “a certain Abraham,”8 which he reclaimed thanks to Kierkegaard and in opposition to Levinas as early as “Violence and Metaphysics” and again as recently as The Gift of Death, is another important milestone in this history.9 As Mark Dooley points out in his contribution to this volume, Derrida was less abashed than some of his peers in his willingness to “stand up for” Kierkegaard, and he asserted that above Nietzsche, Rousseau, and Gide, “it is Kierkegaard to whom I have been most faithful and who interests me most.”10 Less well known perhaps is the concluding meditation on The Sickness unto Death provided by Michel Henry at the end of his massive volume The Essence of Manifestation. It is no exaggeration to say that apart from an appendix on Hegel’s concept of manifestation, Henry ends his magnum opus with a prolonged discussion of Kierkegaard’s account of despair and the clues it provides to Henry’s account of the fundamental affective tonalities that occupy a central place in his phenomenology.11 At the end of his career in Incarnation Henry returned to Kierkegaard, this time with special emphasis on his account of innocence and anxiety .12 It was Henry who precipitated the idea for this collection of essays on Kierkegaard as phenomenologist. It is he who in The Essence of Manifestation referred to Kierkegaard as a phenomenologist and interacted with him as if he were just another laborer in the field of phenomenological research.13 The precipitating insight for this collection is that while Kierkegaard has undoubtedly been an influence on phenomenological thinking, he has rarely if ever been read as a phenomenologist himself. This book is surely not the first such effort. Calvin Schrag for one has written on Kierkegaard as a kind...

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