Does love command an ineffability that remains inaccessible to the philosopher?
Thinking About Love considers the nature and experience of love through the writing of well-known Continental philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Evolving forms of social organization, rapid developments in the field of psychology, and novel variations on relationships demand new approaches to and ways of talking about love. Rather than offering prescriptive claims, this volume explores how one might think about the concept philosophically, without attempting to resolve or alleviate its ambiguities, paradoxes, and limitations. The essays focus on the contradictions and limits of love, manifested in such phenomena as trust, abuse, grief, death, violence, politics, and desire.
An erudite examination of the many facets of love, this book fills a lacuna in the philosophy of this richly complicated topic.
Along with the editors, the contributors are Sophie Bourgault, John Caruana, Christina M. Gschwandtner, Marguerite La Caze, Alphonso Lingis, Christian Lotz, Todd May, Dawne McCance, Dorothea Olkowski, Felix Ó Murchadha, Fiona Utley, and Mélanie Walton.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Thinking About Love: An Introduction
Diane Enns and Antonio Calcagno
Part I Human Vulnerability and the Limits of Love
1 Love and Death
Todd May
2 Love’s Limit
Diane Enns
3 The Subject in Crisis: Kristeva on Love, Faith, and Nihilism
John Caruana
Part II Love, Desire, and the Divine
4 The Phenomenon of Kenotic Love in Continental Philosophy of Religion
Christina M. Gschwandtner
5 Love’s Conditions: Passion and the Practice of Philosophy
Felix Ó Murchadha
6 What Can Love Say? Lyotard on Caritas and Eros
Mélanie Walton
7 Finding a Place for Desire in the Life of the Mind: Arendt and Augustine
Antonio Calcagno
Part III Love and Politics
8 Against Essentialist Conceptions of Love: Toward a Social-Material Theory
Christian Lotz
9 Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil on the Significance of Love for Politics
Sophie Bourgault
Part IV The Phenomenological Experience of Love
10 Trust and the Experience of Love
Fiona Utley
11 The Time of Possible and Impossible Reciprocity: Love and Hate in Simone de Beauvoir
Marguerite La Caze
12 Intentionality and the Neuroscience of Love
Dorothea Olkowski
V Love Stories
13 Love Is Blind: Jacques Derrida
Dawne McCance
14 The Babies in Trees
Alphonso Lingis
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
“The editors of this inspiring new collection rightly contend that the question of love is woefully under-treated in contemporary Continental philosophy. This failure has impoverished both philosophy and contemporary life, making this volume a timely and much-needed intervention as well as a cause for gratitude.”
—Jason M. Wirth, author of Commiserating with Devastated Things: Milan Kundera and the Entitlements of Thinking
