Reviewed by Amy Leigh Peters

Fordham University

Amy Laura Hall’s Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love is an extensive study of Kierkegaard on love. Hall begins with a discussion of Works of Love and its depiction of human love. In each subsequent chapter, she examines a pseudonymous text (Fear and Trembling, Repetition, Either/Or, and Stages on Life’s Way). Taking guidance from Works of Love, Hall presents a new understanding of these pseudonyms (including characters within), by displaying their erroneous conceptions of love and how they fall victim to self-deception and false confidence. Furthermore, she argues that de Silentio, Constantin, Judge William, and the Diarist, among others, deceive themselves by avoiding honest and critical self-assessment.

On Hall’s reading, Kierkegaard was well-aware of our tendency to delude ourselves with misplaced confidence in our ability to love, especially in our intimate relations. He observed this in “the misuse of Luther’s idea of vocation wherein the married state itself is cause for confidence” (14). For example, Judge William, echoing many of the views of Kierkegaard’s Lutheran contemporaries on marriage, takes great confidence in his ability to love in marriage and therefore, does not honestly examine himself. According to Hall, Kierkegaard uses his pseudonyms and their flaws to prod the reader into self-examination and toward confession:

What Kierkegaard intimates in these pseudonymous texts, indirectly and variously, is that the reader must repent. Each story involves a different false start along a wrong route, and the reader must seek instead a relationship with that one who occasions our repentance and our redemption. (3)

Though I will only trace out a few, Hall makes many original claims in her close and nuanced readings of Kierkegaard. First, she highlights Kierkegaard’s connection between confession and love. Hall recognizes that he does not deliberate extensively on how one is to make the shift from human love to Christian love, and yet, without offering a Kierkegaardian recipe, she identifies what is required for the transformation of one’s ability to love. Hall notes that the structure of Works of Love reveals Kierkegaard’s attempt to push the reader toward confession. He does this by closing the work “with a section provoking the reader’s recognition that, ultimately, ‘you are able to do nothing at all’ (WL 362)” (36). According to Hall, Kierkegaard never explains how we can transform our love, but only that Christian love is not possible without the lover’s confession and turning to God. Confession, for Kierkegaard, is not a “univocal confession of sin” (49), it must be humbly grounded in continual and honest self-evaluation. Furthermore, because of our tendency for self-justification, Kierkegaard’s understanding of confession and repentance is that of a continual task, a life-long project, addressed with priority “throughout his [own] life” and ours (49). Hall stresses that this process requires us to examine our lives and relationships honestly, and with sensitivity to our own particular forms of self-deceit.

Second, Hall’s book focuses on the relationships where we are least critical and most confident—our intimate or special relations (lovers, friends, family). Here, we take for granted that we love the beloved selflessly. When Kierkegaard’s command to love the “neighbor” is primarily taken as a call to love those whom we have yet to love (even strangers), the private place of one’s most intimate relations goes unexamined. Hall coaxes us out from behind these closed doors by focusing on intimate relations and in her choice of examples from the pseudonymous texts. Whether it be through an idealization of the beloved (de Silentio or the young man), a sexist understanding of the beloved’s existence as being for the lover (Judge William), or a fear-driven retreat into solitude (the Diarist), Hall demonstrates how each character embodies a unique evasion of honest self-assessment and confession.

Finally, I believe Hall’s most interesting claim concerns the relationship between distance and spiritual closeness. Hall suggests that in the command to love the neighbor God becomes a “wedge” between the lover and the beloved, so that the lover is to love the beloved as first loved by God. The surprising result of this reading is that “separation” is therefore an essential part of Christian love, even in our intimate relations. The proper distance between two lovers arises out of a recognition of the beloved as belonging to God (and not to the lover).

By way of contrast, Hall explains that when the lover, rather than God, is responsible for creating distance between himself and the beloved, the separation is out of character for Christian love. For example, Hall points to the Diarist’s deceitful distance from his beloved. In this case, the distance is created by his fear and hidden suspicions of his lover, which ultimately send him fleeing to a monastery. Hall outlines numerous possibilities of improper distance—all of which she loosely groups together as two different types: either, (1) the lover attempts to possess and subsume the beloved’s distinctness from himself, or, (2) as represented by “woman” in Kierkegaard’s texts, the lover subsumes oneself under the control of the beloved. In both cases, God is absent as the middle term of the relationship. With a careful analysis of the relationships before her, Hall has us question whether the distance we sense between ourselves and our lovers is a result of failed disclosure and lack of humility, or of the healthy acknowledgment that we ourselves and our beloved belong only to God. Hall has clearly followed Kierkegaard’s lead in encouraging the reader to identify with his characters and to acknowledge his or her own illusions about love and marriage. She challenges us to recognize the characters’ detours around self-examination as our detours, and their distortions of love as similar to our own. The result is a provocative and valuable contribution to Kierkegaard scholarship. There is, however, one issue that I would like to see Hall address in a future publication.

Given Kierkegaard’s negative view of preferential love as a disguised form of self-love, it is unclear how (if at all) we are to engage in intimate, special relations, so that preference does not play a role. Hall accentuates Kierkegaard’s “stark contrast between merely human love and the love commanded” as “not mere rhetoric” (13). Even further, she stresses the intensity of the command to love one’s neighbor in its relevance for our intimate relationships. Unfortunately, she is silent on Kierkegaard’s ambiguity on this issue and does not address whether or not these unique special relations (with a romantic partner or spouse) can escape being preferential. It is almost as though she presupposes that these relations are in no way problematic for Kierkegaard.