ABSTRACT
Alison Assiter’s study represents a new turn in the feminist engagement with Soren Kierkegaard. Assiter draws on Kierkegaard to provide an alternative to what she calls liberals’ “metaphysical assumptions” about selfhood. Assiter argues that even non-metaphysical or minimally metaphysical liberal theory, like John Rawls’ theory of justice, is colored by Cartesian and Kantian metaphysics of disembodied rationality. She shows how liberals arbitrarily determine what lies beyond the boundaries of rationality, from the “madness” of Michel Foucault’s Enlightenment-era beggars to the “evil” of modern terrorists. Beyond deconstructing the implicit metaphysics of liberalism, Assiter proposes a new idealization of embodied and empathetic citizens. Kierkegaard’s ethic of love is the core of Assiter’s political theory where rights are supplanted by needs. Kierkegaard himself is a victim of child abuse, Assiter claims, who nonetheless learns to love himself and even to love his abusive father. The call for victims to love themselves and, eventually, their abusers is Assiter’s most controversial move.
