Abstract
Anyone who evinces an interest in Kierkegaard’s view of human society and how his distinctive views of the nature and duties of the human individual are to be expressed in community is likely to be directed to his self-styled ‘Christian Deliberations’ in Works of Love. There we find that Kierkegaard recommends those who are overwhelmed by the scope of the subject to look to a brief summary. He directs the reader to resort to the dead as the best way to gain a handle on life. He goes on to explain that in order to understand the more specific but central question of love and its place in human relationships, we should remain with the dead. There we will find the key to the problem: ‘The work of love in recollecting one who is dead is … a work of the most unselfish, the freest, the most faithful love. Therefore go out and practice it; recollect the one who is dead and just in this way learn to love the living unselfishly, freely, faithfully’ (WL, p. 358).
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Notes
L. Dahmer, A Father’s Story: One Man’s Anguish at Confronting the Evil in his Son (London: Little, Brown & Co, 1994).
G. Steiner, Antigones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) p. 62.
Sophocles, Antigone trans. R. Fagles in The Three Theban Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) pp. 35–128.
Z. Bauman, Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992).
See G.W.E Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977) pp. 270–1.
See J. Derrida, Aporias, trans. T. Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993) p. 61
St Augustine, City of God, trans. H. Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).
I. Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. W. Weaver (London: Pan Books [Picador], 1979).
E Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (London: Serpents Tail, 1994) p. 182.
E. Dickinson, Selected Letters, ed. T.H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1990) p. 183.
Remarkably similar insights are expressed by Jean-Luc Nancy in the following paragraph from his The Inoperative Community, ed. P Connor (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1991) p. 13
G. Bataille, Eroticism, trans. M. Dalwood (London: Marion Boyars, 1987) pp. 94ff.
The translation used is H.W. Cassirer, God’s New Covenant (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989).
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© 1998 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Pyper, H.S. (1998). Cities of the Dead: The Relation of Person and Polis in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love. In: Pattison, G., Shakespeare, S. (eds) Kierkegaard The Self in Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26684-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26684-5_9
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