Love in the Dark

Diane Enns is associate professor of philosophy at McMaster University. She is the author of The Violence of Victimhood (2012) and Speaking of Freedom: Philosophy, Politics, and the Struggle for Liberation (2007) and the coeditor of Thinking About Love: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy (2015).

• Preface Acknowledgments Part I. Legacy Ruined States What Is Love? Anarchic Eros The Cannibal Husbands of Our Futures Two Crucifixions If Only We Had Read the Song of Solomon Burning Find the Clitoris Shame Vulgar Love Ambivalent Pleasure Rigor Mortis Part II. Love The We Happy Love Sweet Apple Insatiable Demand for Presence Love for the Living The Infinite Plasticity of Position L'Amour Fou Beautification Pathological Love The Interworld The Gift "Volo Ut Sis" Part III. Limits Amputation "You Made My Life Better" On the Question of Worth My Best Thing Peeled Skin Can't or Won't The Angryman and the Sweetman Abusion A Misnomer The Paradox of Risk The House of Tragedy The Line A Bad Calculation Sweet Revenge Saving Leaving Part IV. Loss The Original Loss Slow Heart Iron Air Emotional Possibility Mourning Time Cosmic Gift Losing Is Ours Grieving the Living Singularity and Betrayal The Ambiguity of Loneliness Survival Monuments Afterword Notes Index

Diane Enns manages to strike a delicate balance between the intensely personal and the rigorously intellectual. She presents a profound meditation on love and its loss, passion and despair, risking everything and surviving despite everything. These are timeless, all-too-human topics. -- Mari Ruti, author of The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living Love in the Dark is engaging, developing fresh and bold perspectives that challenge the conventional interpretations of love. -- Linell Secomb, author of Philosophy and Love: From Plato to Popular Culture How can a philosopher who is heir of the Western tradition write of love without exceeding the fixed boundary that tradition posits between logos and eros? Moving beyond the confines of a disembodied and dematerialized order of reason, Diane Enns opens this reflection on love to the rich philosophical terrain of fiction, memoir, and poetry, allowing passion-her own and that of such thinkers as Augustine, Arendt, Kristeva, Cixous, and Gillian Rose-to infuse and inform her study. This is, indeed, philosophy by another name. -- Dawne McCance, author of Derrida on Religion: Thinker of Differance