Abstract

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, the paper connects this insight with Climacus' analysis of the subjective thinker and the "essential knowledge" which he ascribes to him in the second part of the 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, one of Kierkegaard's main concerns was 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