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What is the role of love in opening and sustaining the temporal worlds we inhabit? One of the leading scholars in philosophy and the history of religious thought, Thomas A. Carlson here traces this question through Christian theology, twentieth-century phenomenological and deconstructive philosophy, and nineteenth-century individualism. Revising Augustine’s insight that when we love a place, we dwell there in the heart, Carlson also pointedly resists lines of thought that seek to transcend loss and its grief by loving all things within the realm of the eternal. Through masterful readings of Heidegger, Derrida, Marion, Nancy, Emerson, and Nietzsche, Carlson shows that the fragility and sorrow of mortal existence in its transience do not, in fact, contradict love, but instead empower love to create a world.
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations of Main Texts Cited
Preview: The Demands of the Day
1 When We Love—A Place: World’s End with Cormac McCarthy
2 Mourning Places and Time in Augustine
3 The Conversion of Time to the Time of Conversion: Augustine with Marion
4 The Time of His Syllables: Dying Together with Derrida and Augustine
5 Thinking Love and Mortality with Heidegger
6 World Loss or Heart Failure: Pedagogies of Estrangement in Harrison and Nancy
7 Ages of Learning . . . the Secular Today with Emerson and Nietzsche
Last Look
Bibliography
Index
Description
What is the role of love in opening and sustaining the temporal worlds we inhabit? One of the leading scholars in philosophy and the history of religious thought, Thomas A. Carlson here traces this question through Christian theology, twentieth-century phenomenological and deconstructive philosophy, and nineteenth-century individualism. Revising Augustine’s insight that when we love a place, we dwell there in the heart, Carlson also pointedly resists lines of thought that seek to transcend loss and its grief by loving all things within the realm of the eternal. Through masterful readings of Heidegger, Derrida, Marion, Nancy, Emerson, and Nietzsche, Carlson shows that the fragility and sorrow of mortal existence in its transience do not, in fact, contradict love, but instead empower love to create a world.