Kierkegaardian

She conceives of her book as “a Kierkegaardian biography of Kierkegaard,” following “the blurry, fluid lines between Kierkegaard’s life and writing, and allowing philosophical and spiritual questions to animate the events, decisions and encounters that constitute the facts of a life.”

In fact, “Lucky Per” emerges as a savage critique of the persistence, in Danish culture, of a certain Kierkegaardian masochism, in which all choices are made religious rather than secular, purifyingly negative rather than complicatedly affirmative.

She is striving, in the Kierkegaardian tradition, to create a majority of one.

Tux is philosophically speculative, delivering aphoristic riffs that reveal Kierkegaardian abysses in such daily trivialities as a campfire, and mini marshmallows in cocoa.

Last year, a visitor to the Serralves museum in Porto jumped with Kierkegaardian heedlessness, into another of Kapoor’s works, a 2.5-metre circular hole called Descent Into Limbo, fell eight feet and had to be taken to hospital.