Abstract

ABSTRACTThis 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.