LOVE AND HISTORY

In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the historicity of love requires an appreciation of the irreplaceability of the beloved. I do this through a consideration of ideas that were first put forward by Robert Kraut in “Love De Re” (1986). I also evaluate Amelie Rorty's criticisms of Kraut's thesis in “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds” (1986). I argue that Rorty fundamentally misunderstands Kraut's Kripkean analogy, and I go on to criticize her claim that concern over the proper object of love should be best understood as a concern over constancy. This leads me to an elaboration of the distinct senses in which love can be seen as historical. I end with a further defense of the irreplaceability of the beloved and a discussion of the relevance of recent debates over the importance of personal identity for an adequate account of the historical dimension of love.     

Present in Love: Rethinking Barth on the Divine Perfections

While Karl Barth's identification of love and freedom (in that order) as the fundamental divine perfections was intended to eliminate any gap between God as revealed and God's eternal being, Barth's equation of divine freedom with decision fatally compromises this aim by reintroducing the spectre of a ‘hidden God’ behind the God revealed in Jesus. Moreover, it exacerbates a worryingly anthropomorphic model of divine action, already pronounced in older orthodox theologies, that is ill‐suited to upholding the causal integrity of the created order. Substituting presence for freedom as the foundational perfection paired with (and used to interpret) divine love maintains the benefits of Barth's relative prioritization of love while avoiding the problems that accompany the interpretation of divine freedom as decision. Specifically, it provides a model of divine action in which permission rather than decision emerges as the fundamental mode of willing whereby by God brings the world into being and sustains it in existence.     

(Re‐)Forming Freedom: Reflections “after Veritatis splendor” on Freedom's Fate in Modernity and Protestantism's Antinomian Captivity

This essay unfolds in four steps. First, it sketches the way the fate of freedom in modernity – the freedom of the Promethean self – has set the stage for Protestantism's antinomianism as well as for the theological intervention of Veritatis Spendor. The essay focuses here on Kant, Fichte, Nietzsche. Secondly, it shows how Veritatis Spendor overcomes modernity's autonomist conception of freedom. The essay, thirdly, turns to Protestantism “after Veritatis Spendor” and argues that the encyclical's vision of freedom puts into clear relief the antinomian captivity of contemporary Protestantism. Here, the essay also offers a fresh perspective on Luther's largely unknown opposition to antinomianism. It concludes with ten theses “after the Promethean self” that point the way forward, intimating how freedom will need to be rethought theologically in order to overcome the antinomian captivity of contemporary Protestantism.     

Foucault,Velázquez and the place of sacramentality

In Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves, the protagonist Bess McNeill is often viewed as a Christ-figure, in particular, as an image of Christ's love. In this essay, I address the feminist critique that taking Bess in this way represents a serious distortion of Christ's love, arguing that Bess need not be seen as endorsing a self-destructive and victimizing form of love that feminist critics rightly reject. Instead, I suggest that we can view her love as an indictment of the institutions structuring its expression. Finally, I argue that Bess’ love for Jan combines aspects of love that have typically been segregated into eros and agape in a way that enriches our understanding of agape and prompts us in turn to re-evaluate our understanding of Christ's love and death.     

Love and Entitlement: Sartre and Beauvoir on the Nature of Jealousy

This paper argues that an essential and often overlooked feature of jealousy is the sense that one is entitled to the affirmation provided by the love relationship. By turning to Sartre's and Beauvoir's analyses of love and its distortions, I will show how the public nature of identity can inhibit the possibility of genuine love. Since we must depend on the freedom of others to show us who we are, the uncertainty this introduces into one's sense of self can trigger anxiety and pathological attempts to control those others upon whom one's self‐value depends. In jealousy one tries to possess the other person's freedom in the hopes that a constant positive evaluation can be thereby secured. The belief that one is entitled to the self‐perfection that such affirmation promises reveals both the important existential role that the beloved plays in the jealous person's psychic structure and the manner in which gender inequalities can promote such distortions of love.     

EUDAIMONIA AND AGAPE IN MACINTYRE AND KIERKEGAARD'S WORKS OF LOVE

This essay explores connections and divergences between Alasdair MacIntyre's eudaimonistic ethic and Søren Kierkegaard's agapeistic ethic—perhaps the greatest proponents of these ethical paradigms from the past two centuries. The purpose of the work is threefold. First, to demonstrate an impressive amount of convergence and complementarity in their approaches to the transcendent grounds of an ethic of flourishing, the rigors necessary for a proper self‐love, and the other‐directed nature of proper social relations. Second, given the inapplicability of common dichotomies, to pinpoint more precisely where Kierkegaard departs from eudaimonism, and where MacIntyre departs from agapeism. Finally, to show that both Kierkegaard's and MacIntyre's grounds for departure are inadequate, and thus that the most central insights of eudaimonist and agapeist ethics can be harmonized to a greater extent than either Kierkegaard's or MacIntyre's framework can allow.     

TWO FORMS OF LOVE: The Problem of Preferential Love in Kierkegaard's Works of Love

The duty to love one's neighbor as oneself is at the core of Kierkegaard's Works of Love. In this book, Kierkegaard unfolds the meaning of neighborly love and claims that it is the only valid form of true love. He contrasts between neighborly love and preferential love (which includes romantic love and friendship) and criticizes the latter for being nothing but a form of selfishness. However, in some contexts, Kierkegaard seems to acknowledge the significance of preferential love relationships, and does not disallow them. Therefore, his understanding of preferential love appears to be confused and inconsistent. My essay discusses the tension in Kierkegaard's position regarding preferential love, and by presenting recent readings of Works of Love, it asks whether this tension is resolvable and offers a suggestion for a possible solution.     

External Freedom in Kant's Rechtslehre: Political,Metaphysical1

External freedom is the central good protected in Kant's legal and political philosophy. But external freedom is perplexing, being at once freedom of spatio‐temporal movement and a form of noumenal or ‘intelligible’freedom. Moreover, it turns out that identifying impairments to external freedom nearly always involves recourse to an elaborated system of positive law, which seems to compromise external freedom's status as a prior, organizing good. Drawing heavily on Kant's understanding of the role of empirical ‘anthropological’information in constructing a Doctrine of Right, or Rechtslehre, this essay offers an interpretation of external freedom that makes sense of its simultaneous spatio‐temporality, dependence on positive law, intelligibility (or ‘noumenality’), and a priority. The essay suggests that this account of Kantian external freedom has implications both for politics and for the metaphysics of everyday objects and institutions.     

Love as a Problem of Knowledge in Kierkegaard's Either/Or and Plato's Symposium

At the end of the essay “Silhouettes” in Either/Or, Kierkegaard writes, “only the person who has been bitten by snakes knows what one who has been bitten by snakes must suffer.” I interpret this as an allusion to Alcibiades' speech in Plato's Symposium. Kierkegaard invites the reader to compare Socrates with Don Giovanni, and Alcibiades with the seducer's women. Socrates' philosophical method, in this light, is a deceptive seduction: just as Don Giovanni's seduction leads his conquests to unhappy love—what Kierkegaard terms “reflective sorrow”—so the elenctic method leads Socrates' interlocutors to aporia, not to knowledge. I offer a critique of Socrates' ironic stance as a philosopher, which stance is reflected in the theory of love he presents in the Symposium, and suggest that philosophy should be modeled on the romantic love of persons—a love that can be reciprocated—not the love of an impersonal Form, a one-sided love.     

The Postcolonial Other

Abstract

I locate the starting point for this essay on the common ground between the traditionally conceived attribute of divine love and the moral theory known as divine command ethics. The latter assumes that something is good because God commands it; with the former, the gift of divine love requires love in return. In this light, God's command to love is recognized as goodness itself by those ‘he’ loves. In other words, those persons loved by God are morally motivated to love. However, this theistic account of divine command theory simply assumes that love is knowable, do-able and so required. The obstacles to knowing love and loving are rarely made explicit. To tackle some of these, this essay is loosely structured around a dialogue with Kantian morality. Analysis of the gendered nature of love will take place indirectly in the course of my account of duty, pure goodness and moral motivation.     

The Erotic Eucharist

Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical Deus Caritas Est continues the magisterium's twentieth‐century shift from an act‐oriented, procreative approach to sexual ethics to what I will term a heterosexually personalistic one. Situating a heterosexual anthropology within a heterosexual cosmology, Benedict argues that just as God loves humanity with heterosexual eros, so must human beings love each other heterosexually. Although Benedict depends upon the explanatory power of heterosexuality, he perhaps unwittingly ends up depicting God's love not as iconically heterosexual, but as queer. In casting God's love as queer, I do not, even analogously, impute to God a type of homosexuality as Benedict does a heterosexuality. Instead, by drawing attention to the discursive specificity and historical instability of both homosexuality and heterosexuality, I use “queer” to recognize God's love as beyond categorization and as strange; it cannot be corralled into or contained by the historically specific notions of heterosexual and homosexual. But this essay does not merely deconstruct Benedict's heterosexually personalistic cosmology. It uncovers in Benedict's Eucharistic transfiguration of marital love a new and promising way of situating discussions about the ethics of sex.     

TOWARDS A NON‐POSSESSIVE CONCEPT OF KNOWLEDGE: ON THE RELATION BETWEEN REASON AND LOVE IN AQUINAS AND BALTHASAR1

Because of the consistent emphasis he places on the supremacy of love, Hans Urs von Balthasar has occasionally been thought to incline toward a problematic irrationalism. This essay addresses this charge through a comparison of Aquinas and Balthasar on the question of the relationship between intellect and will. It is argued that the superiority of intellect over will generally attributed to Aquinas itself leads paradoxically to irrationalism whenever the object exceeds the soul, and that Balthasar's insistence on the supremacy of love—precisely because it integrates will and intellect and thereby makes the intellectual act structurally ecstatic—in fact allows us to avoid such an irrationalism.     

The Uncanny Self in Love: Divorced Catholic Women Remember Abortion in Romania

This essay presents an ethnographic account of two divorced Catholic women's memories of praying to the Virgin Mary while seeking illegal abortions under the Romanian socialist regime. These women's stories focused on troubling memories of being in love, reflections that were retrospectively shaped by divorce. Drawing on Sigmund Freud's notion of the uncanny, I call these recollections uncanny memories of the self in love. Uncannily remembering one's self in love combines experiential self‐examination and ethical assessment of actions. The notion of the uncanny self in love thus helps bridge the divide between experience‐ and action‐oriented approaches to lived ethics. I argue that the ethical significance of the Virgin Mary's actions depended on my acquaintances’ approach to love. For one woman seeking to stay estranged from her ex‐husband, the Virgin Mary's actions accentuated his ethical immaturity. My other acquaintance harbored more ambivalent feelings toward her ex‐husband; for her, talking about the Virgin Mary helped her relativize feelings of ethical indignation. As a core implication of this argument, I urge greater awareness of the problematic tendency to include the need for greater awareness of tendencies in theories of lived ethics to reify socially situated perspectives on love.     

From the Same Spirit: Receiving the Theological Gifts of Transgender Christians

Transgender Christians bear four transformative gifts to the body of Christ. They celebrate that humans are God's created co‐creators, and that God creates with and through them. Second, gender non‐conforming Christians have learned to steadfastly love (hesed) themselves as they love God and the world. Next, transgender Christians witness that humans are a coherent unity of body‐mind, not a mind in a body. Finally, transgender followers of Jesus welcome the Holy Spirit's gifts of plurality, newness, unity, and freedom.     

WAYS OF DISCOURSE AND WAYS OF LIFE

In book X of the Republic, Plato famously reports “a quarrel between poetry and philosophy.” The present essay examines this quarrel in book X, along with other relevant parts of the Republic, by understanding “philosophy” and “poetry” as rival ways of life and rival ways of discourse. The essay first explains why, in Plato’s view, poetic discourse weakens one’s power to reason and is at odds with philosophic discourse. Then it shows how poetic discourse is bound up with a way of life that champions the value of freedom. Such a life forms a contrast with the philosophic life, which is marked more by stability and unity than by freedom. The quarrel, however, is not a simple antagonism. The essay hence concludes by discussing why, despite the opposition between the two, philosophy cannot do without poetry.     

Tender Mercies: Love,Oatmeal, and the Quest for Wholeness

Tender Mercies (1983) is a simple and quiet film that reveals a complexity in its depiction of the many forms love can assume in the soul. Using some of C. G. Jung's and Robert Johnson's observations on the dynamic nature of love, the article tracks the plot of Horton Foote's award-winning screenplay as it unfolds the qualities of love, beginning with romantic love, the most popular form our current culture depicts and promotes, as well as perhaps less glamorous and outwardly exciting forms that nonetheless ground the soul in fuller, more sustainable relations between couples, father and daughter, father and son, as well as the deep passion for what excites and sustains us as creative persons. It also touches on the infernal form of addiction as a kind of fixed and fixated love that harbors no freedom for the individual; an addiction is understood as pornographic to the extent that it continues to promise what it cannot ever deliver, so the individual is always hooked by its fury. By looking closely at various scenes from the film, the author articulates the slow retrieval of one soul from addiction to a life full, whole, and satisfying in its creative and familial love.     

The Erotic and the Mystical in Postmodernity

Abstract

There has always been a close connection between divine and erotic love in the Western mystical tradition, from the Pseudo-Dionysius to St John of the Cross, and it is found also in poets such as John Donne and George Herbert. It is a tradition returned to in Ron Hansen's novel Mariette in Ecstasy (1991) in which Mariette, though banished from her convent, remains a stigmatic and Christ's ‘lover’. The essay concludes with a brief review of the postmodernity that entertains both the erotic—dangerous sex—and the love of God in true hospitality.     

To Be Is to Betray: On the Place of Collective History and Freedom in Psychoanalysis

This paper explores an open frontier between psychoanalysis and critical theory, the relations between subjective experience and collective history. Its drive is a concern with the question of freedom: How might contemporary psychoanalysis help us think about freedom? How could it, as a practice, help us to be free? On the theoretical level, the paper follows the critique of psychoanalysis offered by Foucault and Adorno, particularly the latter's close reading Ferenczi in Negative Dialectics and his notion of “the spell.” I employ their critique in order to articulate the dilemma psychoanalysis faces vis-à-vis the notion of freedom in social context. I argue that, unlike traditional psychoanalytic discourse, relational psychoanalysis can address this dilemma in a generative way. I find this prospect in the readiness of relational psychoanalysis to realize the potential inherent in the psychoanalytic setting: the creation of a mutually constituted intersubjective space. I tell the story of a young woman for whom love seems impossible, and of a psychoanalytic expedition that finds her ability to love being held hostage. I suggest that what appears in one register as gender and sexual trouble appears in another as a dilemma of attachments and loyalties: my patient's ability to love is spellbound, trapped in a subjective-collective no man's land between her desire to be for herself and the unconscious demands of collective heritage. I argue that for psychoanalysis to be a practice of freedom, it must address the ways in which subjective experience answers to social forces and collective history. I question in this context the relations between freedom, guilt, and responsibility. Re-engaging Adorno, I agree that selfhood may always involve a guilty betrayal of others but argue against him that we must allow this guilt to be reconciled with living. I suggest, in conclusion, that theory is the bearer of collective responsibility.