ABSTRACT
Leo Stan summarizes his guiding thesis as such: "genuine and unique others exist solely theo-Christologically or not at all." Kierkegaard's soteriology is intimately connected with human sinfulness, the prerequisite to the ultimate encounter with otherness—"the human other." Many prominent theorists have written on the role of the other in Kierkegaard's writings before. Most conspicuously, both Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida have been profoundly inspired by the texture of ethical difference internal to Kierkegaardian subjectivity and have directly incorporated this into their own philosophic constellations, albeit each with an idiosyncratic reading of selections from Kierkegaard's collected works. In his major work, Either Nothingness or Love: On Alterity in Soren Kierkegaard's Writings, Leo Stan provides a clear, structured, rigorous, insightful, and original analysis of four differentiated notions of otherness that permeate Kierkegaard's oeuvre. Stan relies on the theo-Christological dimensions in Kierkegaard's thinking to rebut, for example, Levinas' accusation of a "facelessness" in Kierkegaard's grappling with the other.
