i'm teaching kierkegaard's fear and trembling, and i have often listed sk as my favorite philosopher. one issue that always comes up: all his most famous books were written under pseudonyms, and he famously declared that those works should be attributed to the pseudonyms not to himself. this is an absolute field day for a certain kind of academic, and provides a lovely way to fuck with the conception of authorship, or to treat authors as characters - fictions - within the book, and so on: you can read out whole literary theories from this, and people do. they spend books working through the pseudonyms. they think the preudonymity (?!) is the most interesting and salient feature of kierkegaard's work, or at least an extremely interesting and salient feature.

i don't think so, actually. the pseudonyms, of course, aren't serious attempts at disguise; rather they're comic flourishes: johannes de silentio, johannes climacus, johannes anti-climacus, constantin constantius, nicolas notabene, hilarius bookbinder: honestly these are jokes. trying to tease out the distinctive point of view of hilarius bookbinder by a massive hermeneutical inquiry is a waste of time, and somewhere both sk and hilarius are snickering. in completely different ways, of course.

you can sort of find differences if you want; the books, though, are less different from each other that the average author's various works. anyone who has read these books knows they completely share in the same ultra-distinctive, entirely individual voice. i don't think that, even if you had never heard them attributed to kierkegaard, you'd ever be in doubt for a moment that they were written by the same person. truly and obviously, such works as concluding unscientific postscript, stages on life's way, philosophical fragments, fear and trembling, the sickness unto death, the concept of dread, etc, embody and work toward precisely the same point of view: which of them denies or doesn't centralize the idea that faith is total commitment to a paradox or a radical absurdity?

maybe sk wrote under pseudonyms because he doesn't want to claim the faith he describes. on the other hand the pseudonym says just that in each work; that is, they have exactly the same humility in relation to the infinite as sk. stylistically and in terms of content, these books embody as distinctive and continuous a body of work as can be found in the history of philosophy. or literature. (though, we might as well say it: there's much too much of it and it's extremely repetitive. well, that's one form of continuity. on the other hand: the funniest philosopher in the western trad by a long way. and at his best the most profound in my view: a devastating combination.)

i don't think it makes any more sense to take the pseudonyms as a profound indication of something than it does to take him seriously when he says (or when a character says) he found the manuscript of either/or in a secret compartment in an antique desk. 

they are written, i believe, in kierkegaard's authentic individual voice. now of course "authentic," "individual," and "voice" are all problematic notions in the litcrit approaches of the last few decades. well, tough luck, because...there it is!