Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love

Cambridge Studies in Religion and Critical Thought

by Amy Laura Hall

This major study of Kierkegaard and love explores Kierkegaard's description of love's treachery, difficulty, and hope. It reads his Works of Love as a text that both deciphers and complicates the central books in his pseudonymous Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Either/Or and Stages on Life's Way. Amy Laura Hall argues that a spiritual void brings each text into being, and her interpretation is as much about faith as about love. Her scholarly and lyrical style makes this study a poetic contribution to ethics and the philosophy of religion.

Genres: Philosophy

236 pages, Hardcover

First published June 30, 1998

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting take at Kierkegaard interpretation. Most interpreters-critics of Kierkegaard only seem interested in the pseudonymous works...you know, your Fear and Tremblings, your Either/Ors, your Concluding Unscientific Postscripts. Here, however, Hall (if I remember the name, don't have the copy in front of me and I'm way too lazy to open up another tab on my Firefox browser to search it out on Amazon) takes the point of view (which I've seen proposed other places (cf. Melancholy and Kierkegaard's Critique of Modernity ) that these different characters are in someway flawed as human beings.

The key to working our way through the seductively flawed cast of characters--A, Judge Wilhelm, Johannes the Seducer, The Fashion Designer, The Young Poet, Constatine Constantinus, Victor Emeritia, etc.--is yet another work of good ol' wiley and many-wayed Kierkegaard, Works of Love.

With the tenacity of a criminal detective, Hall searches (and in my poor opinion, finds) out the ways in which we confused and fallen human beings look for love (elske-something) and Love (kjierde-something)and often mix up the two. The ethical texts--if I might call them that--of Either/Or, pts. 1 and 2, Repetition, Stages on Life's Way provide the WRONG path to reach love and Love. On the way, Hall , with a Kierkegaardian eye, examines critically--Romanticism, Pure Art, Misogeny, Feminism, pseudo-marital bliss, pseudo-religious bliss, Cynical detachment, and a whole host of other things that make us thoroughly modern. She does this by using Works of Love as the true way of doing things. (one of the major thesis of that book: Take the timber out your own eye before you are to take the speck out of your neighbor's).

My only real criticism is that she's sometimes a little too repetitious in certain places. But the last chapter is a must. A must read for those who want a particularly coherent and well researched and well argued interpretation of Kierkegaard's ethical vision.

[Kara Slade · Rating 5 out of 5]

The final chapter is about as close as one can get to an altar call in an academic press title on "Religion and Critical Theory."