Hélène Politis

Kierkegaard analysed literary and editorial practices of his time in a way that helps us to have a better estimation of our own practices in this area. Here is an example: prevailing talks are self-centered and self-satisfied; by publishing his Prefaces, Nicolaus Notabene shows how these prevailing talks are vain and pointless. But he shows also how such an ironic writing dynamically leads the way to a personal decentration and to an intellectual sobriety able to unblock an empty space (but, this time, in the favourable sense of the word «empty») from which a decisively new relationship to the Whole-Other may be instituted. From this propaedeutic outlook, Socrates’ maieutic questioning remains the essential reference. Kierkegaard, irony, truth, book, Socrates, maieutics