Love without sovereignty

This chapter takes Kierkegaard's book Works of Love to show – against the dominant understanding of his work – that the question of sociality lies at the very heart of Kierkegaard's political theology. While Kierkegaard is often portrayed as the solitary – even solipsistic – thinker of the ‘ single individual’ as against the totalising claims of the crowd and the mass, a careful and rigorous study of his direct discourses, above all his Works of Love, discloses the other side of his polemical negative dialectic. Here we are exposed – through self-examination and judging each one for him-/herself – to the thorn of the second commandment: ‘love your neighbour as you love yourself’: here all erotic self-love is wounded and exposed to the radical alterity of the neighbour. We can call such an ethics as indicative ethics whose decisive constituent element is, to begin and to end with, love alone. The abyss of love is irreducible to the sovereign attributes of the law and to the power of its judgement. In this paradoxical way – Kierkegaard appears to be saying this without saying it in such explicit terms – love alone is sovereign, divinely sovereign, in that it alone is without sovereignty. In this sense too Kierkegaard remains closer to Schelling's political theology of love than to Hegel's theodicy of Absolute Knowledge.

In Works of Love Kierkegaard constructs elements of an indicative ethics which surpasses politics like an infinite surplus which, in turn, effectively throws into question the totalising claims of politics. Instead of Hegel's speculative-dialectical reconciliation of love with knowledge, here we find a negative theological insistence on the radical invisibility of love that infinitely surpasses the light of knowledge, even that of Hegelian Absolute Knowledge. One that reminds us of Pseudo-Dionysius's negative theology of ‘dazzling darkness’, for Kierkegaard the light of love grows dazzlingly dark when one approaches it with the force of the concept, with the violence of the law, with the attributes of judgement.

Such an indicative ethics of love, inspired by Johannine sociality of Christian neighbour-love, makes Kierkegaard's political theology an effective foil against the political theology of Carl Schmitt who makes politics total.