Introduction: Why Deleuze and Kierkegaard?

Summary

It may seem strange, at first sight, to bring together the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Søren Kierkegaard in a book. Kierkegaard's theological commitments, when contrasted with Deleuze's avowed ‘tranquil’ atheism, as much as the former's somewhat marked preference for thinking about suffering, dissatisfaction, anxiety, and the like, make for an apparent strong incompatibility with Deleuze's atheistic philosophy of joy, affirmation and innocence. Perhaps for the length of an interesting paper, but is an entire book really necessary to inspect what these two philosophers might have had to say to one another? In reply, this book stands as an effort to show not only how much these two philosophers did indeed have in common, but also to show how thoroughly Deleuze's thought is linked to Kierkegaard's work and how much of Deleuze there is, in one form or another, in Kierkegaard. To begin this project, my goal here is to assess what Kierkegaard's relationship is to Deleuze at present at the most general level, and also to say something about what has already been said regarding the two, by philosophers of both Deleuzian and Kierkegaardian persuasions.

A Tale of a Missed Connection

Among the more obvious reasons for bringing Deleuze's and Kierkegaard's work together in this way is the fact that the two philosophers so manifestly share a set of conceptual preoccupations and interests. Despite the fact, for example, that Nietzsche is often cited as the point of reference for Deleuze's avowed anti-Hegelianism, one could hardly find a better representative of philosophical anti-Hegelianism than Kierkegaard, whose volumes of pseudonymous writing take frequent aim at Hegel or – at least, as some interpreters have argued – Hegel's representatives in the Danish academic system.1 In fact, if we were to compare the sheer volume of references to Hegel in Nietzsche's work alongside those in Kierkegaard's work, my suspicion is that the latter would dwarf the former, both in number and intensity of acrimony.

Similarly, one can find numerous references to a set of concepts – articularly unusual or distinctive concepts, concepts that strongly characterise both Kierkegaard and Deleuze's work – that would closely associate the two thinkers.