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This article concentrates on the use of literary form as indirect communication in Kierkegaard, as well as on irony as a central notion in theories of literature which apply to his work. There is a functional aspect to Kierkegaardian irony, whereby the use of pseudonyms constitutes the common ground between individuality and conceptuality, which allows him to ‘conceive the singular’. But unlike the Romantics, if subjectivity is ‘truth’ for Kierkegaard, from the point of view of a theanthropy it is erroneous. His perspective presupposes the radical irony of a subject that no longer expects to become an omnipotent self through artistic creation, but recognises itself as heteronomous and refuses the attempt to ground itself by art. Finally, Kierkegaard is compared with the deconstructionist tradition. Hailed as the ‘thinker of modernity’, Richard Rorty takes literally Nietzsche’s aphorism concerning the ‘world as fable’, making literary forms all to be equivalent redescriptions of reality. Such a radical nihilism presupposes the aestheticising of thought, not to mention a relativist version of irony that, in its historical form, could only ‘miss’ the specificity of Kierkegaardian irony.