Met Kierkegaard tegen Kierkegaard. Over essentieel auteurschap en existentiële mededeling.

In his posthumous publication The Book on Adler (1872), Kierkegaard provides the reader, by way of his pseudonymous author Petrus Minor, with the distinction between a "premisse-author" and an "essential author". Along with this difference, a fundamental criterion for all authentic communication between author and reader is given. After having described this distinction in the first part, we connect this insight with Climacus' analysis of the subjective thinker and the "essential knowledge" he ascribes to him in the second part of our article. Also the specific character of indirect communication used throughout Kierkegaard's entire pseudonymous production corresponds to that paradigm. The third part of the article focuses on Kierkegaard's own authorship. As an author, it was one of Kierkegaard's main concerns to safeguard and render manifest the (religious) life-view from which his productions stemmed. Especially in his autobiographical work The Point of View for my work as an author (1859), his implicit attempt to judge his own authorship as "essential" becomes apparent. But especially here, the conflict between the meaning of Kierkegaard's indirect method and the idea of the essential authorship comes to the fore.