Erotic Love: Reading Kierkegaard with and without Marion

Pia Søltoft

3 Citationer (Scopus)

Abstract

The claim of this article is that in Søren Kierkegaard's notion of love as a basic urge in every human being we find a special dialectic between lack and surplus, between need-love and gift-love. Through a comparison with Jean-Luc Marion's description of erotic love in The Erotic Phenomenon, I demonstrate that Kierkegaard's insistence that love is greater than everything and therefore prior to both existence and knowledge seems, on the one hand, to point in the direction of a metaphysical anchoring of love, which would be foreign to Marion. But at the same time, Kierkegaard, like Marion, stresses that we have a universal, human experience of love, which is anchored bodily and sensed phenomenally. This duality points to the fact that Kierkegaard had a much more nuanced notion of love than that simple distinction between eros and agape that Anders Nygren invented.
OriginalsprogEngelsk
TidsskriftDialog
Vol/bind50
Udgave nummer1
Sider (fra-til)37-46
Antal sider10
ISSN0012-2033
DOI
StatusUdgivet - mar. 2011

Emneord

  • Det Teologiske Fakultet
  • Kierkegaard
  • Erotic love
  • Marion
  • Phenomenology

Citationsformater