Love's praxis: the political in Kierkegaard's Works of love

Abstract

The goal of this dissertation is to incorporate Kierkegaard's Works of Love into current theorization of love as a political concept by showing how it models political sensibilities that can be responsive to contemporary problems of political and social injustice. It will be shown that the themes of `love' and `the neighbor', as contained in Works of Love, represent a politics that are critical not only in combating individual commitments to what bell hooks calls, "...the will to dominate and subjugate..." (hooks 1995, 262-272), but the structures of discrimination and oppression that result from such individual commitments as well. This dissertation, then, is concerned with the political subjectivity of the individual as it is, potentially, oriented around the praxis of love of the neighbor, concepts that populate what Lukács termed Kierkegaard's "qualitative dialectic" (Lukács [1952] 1980, 256). (Published By University of Alabama Libraries