This book is a study of the much-debated problem of Soren Kierkegaard's "indirect communication". It approaches the problem, however, in a quite new way by applying some of the insights of recent literary theory. Kierkegaard himself coined the term "indirect communication" for his writings, but there has never been any scholarly agreement as to what the term actually means. If, however, a modern reader starts from the assumption that Kierkegaard was way ahead of his time in being in calm and confident possession of most of the textual tools and devices commonly associated today with the name of Jacques Derrida, then the "aesthetic" texts of Kierkegaard lose much of their traditional obscurity. His "difficult" books of the 1840s no longer appear as textbooks concerned to instruct and to enlighten but rather as maddening devices intended to make things harder for his readers and to refuse them any final position in which they could rest. Instead of treating Kierkegaard's works of the 1840s, then, as perfectly serious presentations of authorial meaning, Roger Poole's book shows how Kierkegaard refuses to offer a personal view on any one of his great themes: love, duty, faith and the anguish before choice. One of the techniques for refusing explicit meaning is the use of undeclared parody. Kierkegaard parodies Hegel, for instance, by emptying Hegel's idealist terminology of meaning and substituting, in a brilliant game of "Hegelian Lego", a suite of oxymoronic self-cancellations. He oscillates between Socratic and Romantic irony, pinning the reader in a constant inability to decide which is which. He parodies the Hegelian psychological textbook by neglecting to mention which particular textbook he has in mind, while continuing to rag its discursive form with finicky accuracy. He scatters those erotic fantasies that fellow Copenhageners would have read as autobiographical with clues whose only purpose is to mislead. Events, however, overtook the urbane master of textuality. Attacked by "The Corsair" in 1846 in a series of malevolent caricatures, he was unable to shrug this off, and the nature of the indirect communication changed. In his struggle against the mass media of his time, the press and public opinion, he was forced to develop the existential category of the lived sign. This study is both a contribution to literary theory, in the sense that it seeks to apply it, and a suggestion for renewal within phenomenological philosophy. A deconstructive approach to the written works is followed by a phenomenological description of the development of the lived sign. The book is an attempt to investigate a theme concerning individual rights and embodiment that descends from Kant through Edmund Husserl to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and was broken off by his death. Merleau-Ponty never wrote an ethics. "Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication" is a sketch toward suggesting how that ethics might have looked.