O My Neighbors, There Is No Neighbor

Authors

Harris B. Bechtol, Texas A&M University-San AntonioFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-2019

Keywords

Kierkegaard, Derrida, neighbor, love, politics, philosophy of religion

Abstract

This article meditates on the Christian command to love the neighbor as yourself by focusing on how both Jacques Derrida and Søren Kierkegaard have read this command. I argue that Derrida, failing in his faithfulness to Kierkegaard, makes a mistake when he includes this command in the Greek model of the politics of friendship in his Politics of Friendship. Such a mistake is illumined by Kierkegaard’s understanding of the neighbor in this command from Works of Love because this understanding helps to develop Derrida’s vision of a democracy and politics that resists the hegemony of the masculine and remains open to the event of a non-hierarchical relation to the other.

ORCID ID

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5258-6360

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1080/21692327.2018.1488149

Comments

This is the author accepted version of the published article:

Repository Citation

Bechtol, Harris B., "O My Neighbors, There Is No Neighbor" (2019). All Faculty Scholarship. 6.
https://digitalcommons.tamusa.edu/pubs_faculty/6