The Anarchē of Spirit^243human freedom. In other words, though God may “grieve” over the
“offense” of anti-theism, divine power is truly manifest in God’s
kenotic (self-sacrificial) love as the refusal to negate, or over-power,
its possibility. As such, God’s love preserves the struggle between
the agonistic self before God and the antagonistic anti-theistic self
in despair.
Furthermore, insofar as it partakes in an agonistic and
apophatic struggle against idols of “God”, anti-theism represents
a more vitalised—if despairingly misdirected—expression of the
freedom of “Spirit” (Ånd) than is found in the sedative “spiritless-
ness” (Åndløsheden) of bourgeois Christendom. In this respect,
Kierkegaard is read as implicitly valuing Proudhon’s anti-theism
as a potential ally in the via negativa (way of negation) towards a
more authentic understanding of the relationship between human
freedom and divine omnipotence. Theology, by attending to the
voice of anti-theism (even within itself), is reminded of the pro-
phetic task of speaking truth to power. Theology is also reminded
of a God whose self-revelation is a subversion of such power, and
one whose love connotes an unfathomable grief over the victims
of the self-apotheosis of that power.
Kierkegaard: The Anarchy of Interpretation and the
Untruth of Crowds
“To be spirit is to be I. God desires to have Is, for God desires to
be loved [...] ‘Christendom’ is a society of millions—all in the third
person, no I.”
—Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers^19In proposing this reading of Kierkegaard and Proudhon, this es-
say may, from its beginning, already be guilty of a hermeneutic
anarchy—albeit an anarchy of (mis-)reading which Kierkegaard’s
own an-archē of authorial authority has itself made think-
able. The elliptical evasions, pseudonymous self-effacements,
polyvalences, and ironic mis-directions of Kierkegaard’s liter-
ary styles elicit the possibilities and temptations of an anarchic
hermeneutic. In other words, by opening his works to be free-
ly (mis-)appropriated in the name of existential subjectivity,
does Kierkegaard bequeath the right to (re)interpret his works,