Rick Anthony Furtak

Frances Maughan-Brown

This is the first book in any language to collect scholarly essays on Kierkegaard's extraordinary series of Lily Discourses. Long considered “merely” devotional writings, the Lily Discourses constitute a sustained and repeated attempt to respond to the imperative issues in Matthew's Gospel. Kierkegaard discovers in figures of the lily and the bird a paradoxical obligation to think together, unremittingly, both suffering and joy, the fleeting nature of experience, and the effort to endow this very transience with enduring significance. In Kierkegaard and the Poetry of the Gospel, a diverse group of emerging and established interpreters addresses the religious, literary, and philosophical dimensions of these discourses. In the process, they identify and develop a theory of language-and of exemplarity-crucial to all of Kierkegaard's writings. To ask what the lily and bird teach is also to ask what it means, or could mean, to be human. This collection is pivotal in registering, clarifying, and celebrating Kierkegaard's multiple responses to that question suspended at the heart of his Lily Discourses. It is the go-to text for anyone teaching or writing about the Lily Discourses across philosophy, literary studies, and religion.

Essays on the Lily Discourses

Kierkegaard and the Poetry of the Gospel

Examines four discourses by Kierkegaard, arguing that they play a critical and surprising role in his oeuvre and contribute to the philosophy of figural language. How do texts speak with authority? That is the question at the heart of Kierkegaard’s theory and practice of “indirect communication.” None of Kierkegaard’s texts respond to this question more concisely and powerfully than the four discourses he wrote about the lily in the Gospel. The Lily’s Tongue is a nuanced, sustained reading of these Lily Discourses. Kierkegaard takes the lilies as authoritative, rather than merely “figural” or “metaphorical.” This book is a careful exploration of what Kierkegaard means by this authority. Frances Maughan-Brown demonstrates how Kierkegaard argues that the key is in the act of reading itself—no text can have authority unless the reader grants it that authority because no text can entirely avoid figural language. Texts don’t speak directly; their tongue is always the lily’s tongue. What is revealed in the Lily Discourses is a groundbreaking theory of figure, which requires a renewed reading of Kierkegaard’s major pseudonymous works. “Closely analyzing one of the least known yet most exacting series of texts in Kierkegaard’s authorship, his discourses on ‘the lily in the field and the bird of the air,’ Maughan-Brown breaks apart disciplinary barriers between theology, philosophy, aesthetics, and critical theory, while at the same time showing how Kierkegaard’s discourses can quietly illuminate a constellation of ideas drawn from Plato, Kant, Hegel, Benjamin, and Derrida. Following Kierkegaard’s texts to the letter, Maughan-Brown attends to what his texts do as much as to what they say.” — Peter Fenves, author of The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time

Frances Maughan-Brown

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