Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love

Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love By Amy Laura Hall Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002. 222 pp. $21.00.

Imagine, the philosopher Bertrand Russell said, a barber who shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself? If he does not, he does; if he does, he doesn't. This puzzle is a version of "Russell's paradox," and in its simplicity and dizzying circularity it rivals Kierkegaard and his legendary doctrine of indirectness.

How does a commentator describe and analyze an author who claims that truth cannot be expressed directly? On one hand, she might lay out the philosophical presuppositions, background, and argument of such a position-and, if true, in just this way, falsify Kierkegaard's central claim about truth; or, if false, preserve Kierkegaard by destroying the commentary. On the other hand, a commentator might take Kierkegaard's claim as true and, in just this way, reject the traditional work of a commentary: to describe and analyze another's work objectively. Amy Laura Hall faces this puzzle squarely and chooses the second path. "We resist the work Kierkegaard intends unless the text hits home, literally . . . . The 'concept' of 'repetition' in Repetition [1843] cannot do the work Kierkegaard intends if we wrest it free from the text and send it soaring into the atmosphere . . . . In a lovely way, Repetition, as a text, prohibits its use as an escape from immediacy, that is, your immediacy and mine . . . . Just as Repetition's narrator is denied repetition while sitting safely alone in the theater, voyeuristically observing others enact, scholars who carefully extract and re-narrate the concept deny themselves the point . . . . In an attempt to be true to Kierkegaard's homiletic intent, I will throughout this book remain close to the twists and turns of each text, pulling back from his prose and his poetry only in order to haul each one of us back in."

A book written on this premise will not conform to standard practice. Although there is ample citation from secondary scholarship in the endnotes and some debate with those interpretations within the text itself, Hall's book does not bolster or undermine Kierkegaard's claims directly, nor produce the theological and philosophical thought-world from which he emerged. Rather, this book continues Kierkegaard's work, re-enacting the method of indirectness and searching for "clues" to the puzzles of self-deception and betrayal that are the stuff of Kierkegaard's early authorship.

True to these aims, Hall focuses on four of Kierkegaard's most celebrated pseudonymous works: Fear and Trembling (1843), Repetition, Either/Or (1843), and Stages on Life's Way (1845). These she reads in light of Kierkegaard's direct, Christian treatise, Works of Love (1847). Two governing themes emerge from this arrangement: The reading will be "inter-textual"-each work will be entered into on its own terms and the terms set by its neighboring works; and the locus will be love and its practice or "works," before both God and creatures. But because Christian faith is "an absolute relation to the Absolute" and springs from an immediate command to the individual alone, Christian love itself cannot be the center of Kierkegaard's or Hall's description. Rather, Hall leads us into the labyrinth of human, romantic love and our ceaseless efforts to capture, improve, evade, and destroy it-all the while uncertain which is being done.

Feminist analysis lies close at hand here. Though Hall does not "break the frame" to make use of feminist argument directly, her investigation of the female characters in Kierkegaard's work, her direct address to female readers, and her reliance upon feminist scholarship, cited in the endnotes, makes gender a preoccupation of this book. Some readers may find Hall's prose dense: "With Kierkegaard's summons to indebted, forgiving love in Works of Love comes a warning for all Cordelias, wives and novices to refuse the pernicious circle of evaluative observation and asymmetrical servitude their men have created . . . . Even though William's evaluation of his wife's comeliness is within the context of committed fidelity, his continued aesthetic interest in her as the beheld is a key point in his defense of the institution itself." But such style is just what Kierkegaard endorses in Works of Love: "These Christian conclusions, which are the fruit of much reflection, will be understood slowly but then also easily; yet they surely will become very difficult if someone by hasty and curious reading makes them very difficult for himself."

Amy Laura Hall's book on Kierkegaard is a patient, careful, and insightful investigation into the complexity of human love and the ineffable grace of the divine.

KATHERINE SONDEREGGER

Virginia Theological Seminary

Alexandria, VA

Copyright Theology Today Oct 2003
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