In this article I expand upon Deleuze’s injunction to ‘become capable of loving without memory’, reading the thought of Søren Kierkegaard and Gilles Deleuze as laying the foundations for a view that I call ‘Christian Atheism’. This is founded upon four basic principles: (1) God is love; (2) God-Love is neither a person nor a substance; (3) God-Love is the immanent, not transcendent, cause of all things; (4) God-Love is not a moral judge, but implies an ethical comportment, calling us forth in the love of self and in the love of the other or the love of the neighbour. I look first to Kierkegaard’s understanding of God as love, drawing comparisons with Deleuze’s notion of Being as affirmation. I then expand upon Kierkegaard’s God-Love through the sacrificial structural relation between renunciation and return as discussed in Fear and Trembling, before using this to expand upon Deleuze’s understanding of love without memory.

A reasonable response to the tragedies of the contemporary moment, to what we see and hear daily, is nihilistic numbness. Just as for Søren Kierkegaard the Christian belief in the incarnation is absurd, to affirm this world, to believe in it, is absurd. Gilles Deleuze is not lured by the object of Kierkegaard's belief, but to the movements Kierkegaard's belief enacts, its immanent implications. Deleuze calls us to believe in the world by virtue of the absurd, for it is through this absurd belief that we may actually enact a potentiality that a reasonable response would obscure.

This article examines Deleuze’s work on cinema as an indirect response to views on the ontology of art expressed in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. The pseudonyms of ‘A’ and ‘B’ claim that traditional art forms cannot capture movement and time in a manner adequate for expressing the aesthetic and ethical life-views they respectively represent. Through analysis of Kierkegaard’s text as well as of key scenes from Casablanca (1942) and A Hidden Life (2019) , I argue that the movement-image and time-image provide a compelling answer to these limitations and fulfil their hidden promise of an art form capable of such expression.

Reading Søren Kierkegaard through Gilles Deleuze, this article invites readers to engage with the existence-modes (aesthetic, ethical, and so on) as a series. The ‘either/or’, a site at which conditions for transformation emerge, becomes a prompt for tuning into the erotics of existence, from asexual and queer desires to creative passions. Turning to Audre Lorde’s existential account of erotics, the article makes the case for Kierkegaard’s import for queer, feminist and affect studies.

The article unpacks Deleuze’s understanding of the radical potential lying in Kierkegaard’s notion of subjectivity. It explains why Kierkegaard’s figure of the knight of faith is pertinent for our present age and traces the manner in which Deleuze reconstructs this figure for developing his own concept of becoming and, specifically, of ‘becoming nobody’. But why is Deleuze, a self-proclaimed philosopher of difference, attracted to the idea of ‘becoming imperceptible’? We answer this question by showing how the Kierkegaardian notion of interiority turns into a key concept within a new Deleuzian understanding of the political.

This article examines dramatisation in Deleuze and Kierkegaard, encapsulated in the formulas ‘the stuttering of language’ and ‘the question that silences’. Deleuze’s differential approach actualises virtual ideas within a system of heterogenesis through the interplay between actual concepts and intensive dramas. Conversely, Kierkegaard’s existential approach, examined in The Concept of Anxiety, establishes an infinite loop between the psychological language of anxiety and the dogmatic language of hereditary sin, leading to a third existential language centred on the moment of appropriation. The article concludes by contrasting Deleuze’s focus on expression through internal differences with Kierkegaard’s emphasis on making an existential choice.

This article examines Difference and Repetition’s oblique engagement with Kierkegaard. After canvassing Kierkegaard’s concept of repetition, I reconstruct Deleuze’s disagreement with it, arguing that Deleuze resists Kierkegaard’s view of subjectivity rather than his faith in a transcendent God. Regarding Deleuze’s agreement with Kierkegaard, I contend that he reads Kierkegaard’s opposition to Hegel and emphasis on the future into Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. This discussion reveals that Deleuze’s encounter with Kierkegaard is subtler, and more productive, than has been appreciated. It also foregrounds Deleuze’s original contributions to a concept of repetition while illuminating his principled approach to the history of philosophy.