SKC Workshop

Elizabeth Xiao-An Li & René Rosfort

(University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

"The Existential Challenge of Romantic Love: Negativity and Ethics In Kierkegaard’s Thought"

Recent years have seen a growing interest in Kierkegaard’s account of specifically romantic love (Elskov) and its relation to selfhood. Having long been considered hostile to erotic or romantic modes of love, new research has sought to emphasize Kierkegaard’s affirmative view of elskov. However, we suggest that many of these recent scholarly discussions have overlooked the anxiety and ambiguity that Kierkegaard expresses in the existential experience of love. Romantic love involves both positive and negative dimensions, and the entanglement of these is at the heart of the existential challenge of romantic love found in Kierkegaard’s authorship. Anxiety allows us to capture and explore the lived ambiguity of romantic love. Neglecting the existential difficulties disclosed by anxiety risks leaving us with an impoverished ethics of love as well as an impoverished reading of Kierkegaard. In contrast to accounts that only rarely engage systematically with anxiety, we therefore argue that it is impossible to articulate a Kierkegaardian account of romantic love without careful consideration of Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety. Our argument is that the ambiguity at the core of romantic love revealed in anxiety is crucial for formulating an ethics of love that does justice to love’s diversity and avoids potentially oppressive normative accounts of how to love.