Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays exploring the nature and experience of love, its contradictions and limits, and its material and ideal forms. Drawing from leading contemporary Continental philosophers, contributors focus on love as it relates to such phenomena as trust, abuse, grief, death, hatred, politics, and desire.
Trade Review“The contributors—scholars from Canada, Australia, the UK, and the US—offer insightful examinations of love, in its romantic/erotic, kenotic, friendship, and agapic forms. . . . A worthy foray into a topic of universal human experience, this collection will awaken readers to the value of what philosophy today says about love.”
—S. Young Choice
“By bringing together a variety of critical approaches in contemporary Continental philosophy, ranging from phenomenology and psychoanalysis to neuroscience and Marxism, this comprehensive collection explores in depth the complexity, complicity, and possibility of love in its multiple manifestations: erotic, political, religious, and social. Through the undertheorized prism of love, the book addresses key contemporary philosophers—Arendt, Beauvoir, Derrida, Kristeva, Lyotard, Marx, Merleau-Ponty—and offers compelling rethinking of crucial philosophical themes, such as vulnerability, finitude, alterity, passions, nature, and materialism, as well as philosophy itself.”
—Ewa Ziarek,author of Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism
“This collection opens up an overdue discussion of the intersections of love and thinking within the continental tradition.”
—Helen A. Fielding Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
“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
Table of ContentsContents
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
