Bartholomew Ryan

Bartholomew Ryan is a philosopher and musician, and researcher at IFILNOVA, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He has published various books and essays interpenetrating philosophy and literature, the most recent book being Fernando Pessoa and Philosophy: Countless Lives Inhabit Us (co-editor, Rowman & Littlefield, 2021); and he is the author of Kierkegaard Indirect Politics: Interludes with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno (Brill, 2014). He has taught at universities in Brazil, Berlin, Oxford, Aarhus, Dublin, Lisbon and Bishkek. In music, he released a solo album called Jabuti (under the name Loafing Hero) in 2022; leads the international band The Loafing Heroes (six albums released in 2009-2019); and is a member of the experimental audio formation Headfoot.

"Not only does this book offer the rare gift of an author who is an expert in both Kierkegaard and political thought, but the added bonus of an author with an ability to pull from some of the masters of modern literature (Melville, Kafka, Joyce, Beckett) to create a work as interesting in a literary sense as it is in a philosophical sense [...] Ryan does not only outline the manner in which Kierkegaard’s work served a crucial role in the intellectual development of each of these figures, but also provides what is one of the best overviews currently available of the philosophical relationship between the work of Kierkegaard and German critical theory. By the conclusion of the book the reader is left wondering why they have thus far failed to realize how Kierkegaardian figures like Benjamin and Adorno are, and how much Kierkegaard himself already embodies so much of the philosophical ethos of German critical theory."

-Michael O’Neill Burns, " Sřren Kierkegaard Newsletter, December 2014