It is widely known that the ancient Greek language distinguished three main kinds of love. With the exception of one sustained discussion that I consider carefully, friendship receives scarcely a handful of references in its own right in Works of Love, for it is usually lumped together with erotic (or romantic) love – “and friendship” is the phrase used to conjoin philia to eros as a kind of afterthought, and this occurs dozens of times in Kierkegaard’s tremendous yet maddening 1847 text. Incessantly, the flaws of philia are declared in Works of Love to be exactly the same as the flaws of eros. For the most part, that leaves no room for a consideration of friendship itself. My chapter seeks to remedy this neglect, turning to Kierkegaard’s example of Jesus’s love for Peter.

This chapter focuses on the Works of Love deliberation “Love Hides a Multitude of Sins” (and, where relevant, Kierkegaard’s 1843 discourses on that topic), exploring the figure of the “one who loves” [den Kjerlige]. Drawing on the deliberation’s discussion of silence, mitigation explanations, and forgiveness, and some arguments from my book Love’s Forgiveness about love’s way of seeing ambiguous evidence, I sketch the contours of a virtue manifested in den Kjerlige: generosity of spirit. I then ask: If we took seriously Kierkegaard’s portrait of den Kjerlige, what are the implications for contemporary moral and social discourse? How would such a person engage in moral criticism or social critique? What does this suggest about the controversial category of “microaggressions?” Through a consideration of “Love Hides,” some recent work on the ethics of “social punishment,” especially online public shaming, and contemporary debates about microaggressions, this exercise in “applied Kierkegaard” will argue that Kierkegaard’s deliberation offers an important counterweight to hyper-suspicion, judgmentalism, and self-righteousness in a polarized world.

Early in the text of Works of Love (1847) Kierkegaard makes the claim that “Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally and happily secured against despair.” The purpose of this chapter is to interrogate how this claim might relate to his later claim in The Sickness unto Death (1849) that it is faith that is the opposite of despair. The first section introduces the intertwined dynamics of love and despair as they are traced out by Kierkegaard in both Works of Love and The Sickness unto Death. The second section of this chapter argues that there is a genuine therapy that the loving person undergoes and is able through love of others to heal the sickness unto death that is nothing other than despair. The third and final section of this chapter considers the basis on which we might attribute to Kierkegaard a view of the theological virtues at least as being closely related by dint of a common structure and a common aspiration to consolation and integration of the self with itself in peace and reconciliation despite the unavoidable sorrows of our lives.

On a standard approach, love’s proper object is construed in terms of personhood or rational agency. Some philosophers in this broadly Kantian tradition deny that love has a proper aim: specifically, they reject the idea that love properly aims at the good of the beloved. They worry about paternalism and encroachment. In this chapter, we show how Kierkegaard’s Works of Love advances a rival approach: one which provides an account of how love can properly aim at the good of the beloved, without thereby becoming objectionably paternalistic or encroaching, together with an alternative conception of love’s object. We bring out the significant advantages of this approach, which emphasizes our human interdependence and mutual vulnerability. Through a comparison with the ethical thought of K. E. Løgstrup, whose philosophy of love we present as standing in significant continuity with Kierkegaard’s, we further show how the expressly theological framework advanced in Works of Love may also be developed in a more secular direction.

This chapter provides an analysis of the structure of love in Kierkegaard’s thought, which takes its most developed shape in Works of Love. This analysis will help us understand the four key elements of Kierkegaardian love that constitute it in its proper sense. The four elements of love are: repetition, time, commitment, and the good of the other. The overall argument in this chapter is that for Kierkegaard love necessitates a repeated, hence time-oriented, commitment to the good of the other. The object of this commitment is the other and that which is truly their good, which is their “abiding in love.”

Positing the question concerning the meaning of life in terms of "how should one live so that the value of life be accessible to one," my claim is that Kierkegaard’s answer to this question is "by loving." To explain this answer, I focus on the idea of "God as a middle term" that Kierkegaard presents in Works of Love. Further to interpreting this as saying that one’s relationship with God provides a deeper basis for loving, I claim that one’s relationship with God provides a deeper basis also for living. Having God as "the middle" in love, I suggest, is in fact to experience goodness, and by this to affirm one’s existence as valuable. Experiencing this goodness, however, depends on becoming oneself, which, for its part, depends on loving another. Thus, in the context of loving, one in fact sustains three sets of relationships: with God, with the beloved, and with oneself. In the chapter I demonstrate the interdependency of these relationships, and how they constitute a meaningful life.

The paradox Works of Love approaches is that love is commanded. Taking up the description of love as fulfilling the law, Kierkegaard presents an account of law that is never actualized except in the decision that is love, and an account of love that is continuously called or goaded into becoming by the law. The ambivalence of this temporal “sequence” is of the kind that Kafka would later portray in his story “Before the Law.” This chapter argues that Kierkegaard’s law cannot appear for us except through a political reading in which I ask in my specific historical context, “what is justice”? Works of Love thus opens a reading of the paradoxical Christian commandment which would allow philosophers like Levinas to articulate a radical ethics of response. To read Kierkegaard’s Works of Love faithfully is to be charged to love.

Chapter 5 explores the construction of women, especially young women, as dubious and untrustworthy figures in male discourse, a source of cynicism and doubt about kinship’s future. It captures men’s fears about ‘greedy’ women and ‘gold diggers’ who only want to marry men in order to expropriate their wealth. At the same time, the chapter explores counter-discourses of young women getting by in a world of male failure, their relations with their male kin, and their ambitions to become successful ‘hustlers’ in their own right. Speaking to regional literature on love, marriage, and youth relationships, it explores the gendered tensions created by a world of masculine destitution, illuminating male fears about the capacity of women to exploit their ‘in-betweenness’ to acquire patrilineal land.

“Manners” alternates between the portrayal of self-reliant “gentlemen” like Montaigne, Socrates, and El Cid, who are “original and commanding” and “fashion,” an imitative “hall of the Past” where “virtue [has] gone to seed.” But near the end of the essay he turns away from forms of aristocratic morality by introducing two new heroes: a woman, “the Persian Lilla,” who reconciles “all heterogeneous persons into one society”; and then “Osman,” a poor beggar at the gates of the Shah who is a “great heart … so sunny and hospitable in the centre of the country,” and whose wealth lies in his ability to “harbor” madness without sharing it. The introduction of Lilla and Osman late in “Manners” raises the question of how they align with its other heroes. Are they part of a turn or contrary tendency showing up late in the essay, or a deeper exploration of forms of virtue – especially love – already introduced?

Chapter 10 explores the range of love in Plotinus, going from human earthly (including sexual) loves up to the One/Good as itself love. Plotinus takes over Plato’s interest in love and makes it into a feature of reality in general. Human love – the desire to unite with the beloved, the feeling of need – anticipates aspects of higher levels of love, soul’s love which brings it to union with transcendent Intellect, Intellect being itself love of the One. I discuss the special sense in which the One can be said to be love and self-love.

Mœurs, the second major censorship topic, were cornerstones of how contemporaries shaped their world, especially as regimes changed. This chapter is organized thematically around the topics of love and relationships, titles (especially ‘citoyen’ or the lack thereof), brigands, justice, and false appearances, before concluding with new material on the fate of Le Mariage de Figaro – a play that touches on many of these themes. These examples, which include major comedies as well as works at the Porte Saint Martin, the Gaité, or the Ambigu-Comique, and secondary theatres in the provinces, demonstrate how the state and contemporaries used censorship around the depiction of mœurs to advance their specific view of the world. Interestingly, when it comes to mœurs, the limit of the tolerable where lateral censorship kicks in is often within the legally permissible, revealing a gap between what people wanted and the reality of a new political regime.

Chapter 4 brings together the works of French poet and lyricist Guillaume de Machaut with those of bilingual English poet John Gower, as well as some of Geoffrey Chaucer’s lyrics. These authors take part in the ‘intellectualisation’ of love poetry that sees the language of phantasmatic love’s joy be confronted with that of Boethian happiness and sufficiency. This confrontation, I argue, demonstrates the incompatibility of love’s joy with happiness: the latter is a form of self-mastery whereas the former fragments the subject in self-delusion. This chapter also traces the transmission of the French language of joie d’amour into Middle English and its relationship with the native blisse, which I show to be at the convergence between philosophical, mystical and erotic languages of love. While Gower foregoes the native blisse, Chaucer’s lyrics bring the languages of joie and bliss together to build a new form of love’s joy as the consummation of desire and an escape from earthly temporality.

This book on the language of love’s joy starts with the acknowledgement that such a language has repeatedly been expressed as impossible. The poetic and vernacular tradition of joie d’amour originates in the lyrics of the troubadours, which famously sing the absence of fulfilment in the endless prolongation of desire: it is thus born in a lyrical language that presupposes its impossibility. This study on the language of love’s joy is thus grounded in the paradox that love’s joy is beyond language. The elusive nature of the emotion has resulted in a lack of studies on love’s joy. If there is an important scholarly tradition on the semantics of Old Occitan joi, this critical interest has been confined to the French literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and has not been picked up by the field of emotion history nor by more recent studies on medieval love literature.

Chapter 2 traces the genesis of the literary tradition of vernacular love’s joy in the Occitan lyrical tradition, Chrétien de Troyes’ narrative romances and the allegorical Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris. It explores the capacity of the language of lyrical joy, which is at once nothing – an absence, a dream – and everything – the lover’s direction and life force, a capacity embodied in its recurrent patterns of spatiality, enclosure and exteriority. In Chrétien’s romances, the spaces of joie are multiplied. If joie d’amour is enclosed in the chamber and in the irretrievable feeling of two bodies and souls coming together, joie de cour embodies the communal joy of the Arthurian court to which love’s intimate joy is often opposed. In writing the phantasmatic and oneiric nature of love’s joy, both imagined and experienced, these influential twelfth- and thirteenth-century lyrical and narrative works construct a language of love’s joy which breaks down the boundaries between exterior and interior and between self and other.

The book concludes with a reflection on one of the main features of the joy of love, its unreality: joy is or feels like it is out of this world. For many of the authors surveyed in this book, joy’s unreality does not suggest its naivety or foolishness but its very power to bridge phantasm and reality, the transcendent and the immanent. The conclusion opens up onto the European Renaissance: while the language of phantasmatic love’s joy is taken up by Petrarchist poetry, it is in seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry that is found the continuation of a language of love’s joy as the arresting and expansion of the present moment. John Donne and Thomas Traherne write of a joy that is here and now yet experienced as an everywhere, they write of its power to bring us out of ourselves and to reveal the transcendent within human love.

If the first Italian vernacular poetry of the thirteenth century seamlessly translates the lyrical concept of joi into gioia, the trecento authors Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio transcend the lyrical language of phantasmatic joie d’amour and deploy a new vocabulary. Both Dante and Petrarch create a new form of lyricism in attempting to place lyrics within linear narratives that lead to a form of happiness (beatitudine) or self-knowledge. Moments of love’s joy, however, are characterised by their self-forgetfulness and their lyrical or atemporal escape from narrative. The chapter shows how the three authors posit joy at the crux of important poetic and epistemological questions of concealment and revelation, reinventing the language of love’s joy as one of transcendence. In Dante’s Paradiso, the feeling of joy is the key to Dante’s apprehension of the inapprehensible, whereas Boccaccio uses the phantasmatic nature of lyrical joy to parallel it with spiritual revelation.

Chapter 5 is a study of Troilus and Criseyde, a poem that showcases Chaucer’s transformation of the language of blisse into that of erotic and transcendent joy. Chaucer constructs a new language of love’s joy indebted to the French and Italian traditions while at the same time shaped around an innovative semantics of love’s blisse. This language, crucially, constructs itself in opposition to philosophical felicity: in quasi-apophatic discourse, the poem expresses the ‘passing’ quality of the lovers’ joy, which exists beyond the conceptual language of philosophical happiness. This last chapter focuses on the writing of love’s joy within tragedy: the bliss of love is what it is because of its precarity, because it is surrounded by death. But if Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde offers an exceptionally memorable scene of joy, it is because of its use of a transcendent language of bliss that arrests, albeit briefly, the passage of time.