The work of the German philosopher Michael Theunissen spans a forty-year period from 1958, when he published his doctoral thesis The Concept of Earnestness in Søren Kierkegaard, to the present. His general intellectual trajectory can be divided into four loosely distinct phases, developing from an early interest in existentialism, via a period focused on communication theory, through his Hegelian works of the 1970s, on to his last writings, which mark a return to Kierkegaard-influenced thought, now mediated through a commitment to hermeneutics and communication theory. The work most widely known in English, The Other (1965; translated 1984), dates from the second period. Two books, Hegelʼs Doctrine of Absolute Spirit as a Theologico-political Treatise (1970) and Being and Appearance (1978), are the major products of his Hegelian period.

Theunissen describes his position in German philosophy as a simultaneous commitment to Kierkegaardʼs philosophy of interiority, as the reality ʻwhich we ourselves areʼ, and to Marxʼs materialist dialectics, as the ʻreality of our world.ʼ In this regard, he explores the interface between two different but often related areas of German thought. His ideas are situated in the margins of critical theory, as an unorthodox brand of neo-Marxism. But he also retains an attachment to the radical Protestant theology of Kierkegaard and his German interpreters, for the Kierkegaardian quest for true subjectivity forms the basis of his social critique. If the critical theories of Adorno and Horkheimer may be considered a negative ontology of social phenomena, in which determinate negation charts social and cultural domination, Theunissenʼs thought can be viewed, in a Kierkegaardian–Marxist sense, as a negative theology of social being. In contrast to the partial anti-subjectivism of Adorno, Benjamin and Horkheimer, Theunissenʼs thought links the critical potential of socio-political reflection with the vision of redeemed, integral subjectivity.

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