‘A good neighbour is a dead one’

—Søren Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard never said this. It was Žižek, actually, with what he calls ‘Kierkegaard’s insight’ (PV 309). In The Parallax View, Žižek made this claim against the backdrop of the topic of necrophilia, political correctness, and tolerance. He elaborates on the ‘insight’ as follows: ‘A dead neighbor—a corpse—is the ideal sexual partner for a “tolerant” subject trying to avoid harassment: by definition, a corpse cannot be harassed; at the same time, a dead body does not enjoy, so the disturbing threat of excess enjoyment for the subject playing with the corpse is also eliminated’ (PV 309-310). What Žižek is pointing out here (about liberalism) is that a perfectly tolerable, sanitised, goody-two-shoes neighbour is not a person capable of enjoyment, but a corpse; conversely, good neighbours, to the extent that they aren’t corpses, are never simply ‘good’. Notwithstanding how Žižek seems to mention Kierkegaard merely as a namedrop, I wonder if Kierkegaard himself would agree with the ‘insight’ Žižek attributes to him.

It is unclear whence in Kierkegaard’s corpus Žižek drew his inspiration, let alone his Kierkegaardian insight. To hazard a possible answer, we could turn to Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, Book 2, Chapter 9, ‘The Work of Love in Recollecting One Who Is Dead’. In general, Kierkegaard investigates what the abstract command to love one’s neighbour means in a concrete sense, that is, with respect to our deed and commitment (our ‘works’ of love) to a determinate other (sorry if this sounds Hegelian). Although, he ultimately goes on to argue (or, at least, motivate our religious sensibility) that true love manifests if and only if love loves another first and foremost as a neighbour, that is, in terms of neighbour-love. Across the volume, there are numerous memorable sections—Kierkegaard’s discussion on the dash (WL 264-279), for example, says more about being ethical than any textbook on normative ethics could aspire to—but let’s focus on his discussion on loving the deceased.

Most simply, the work of love for the deceased, as the recollection thereof, is, for Kierkegaard, who signed WL under his own name, is the most unselfish, free, and faithful work of love (WL 349, 351, 355). For these three predications, Kierkegaard gives the following elaborations: 

(1) Love is most unselfish iff ‘one can of course remove every possibility of repayment’ and love still (WL 349), which, however, does not amount to being unconditional, since ‘repayment’ here relates only to the deceased and not to the others, from whom one could benefit from such a work of love. Still, if one compares this to, say, a parent’s love for their kin, then, where one says that the latter is unconditional, one is also most likely to say that the former is likewise, if not even more, since ‘whether you are sleepless and expectant because of him or you completely forget him, it seems to make no difference at all to him’ (WL 350). Simply put, the work of love for one who’s dead has no ‘promotional period’.

(2) Love is freest iff ‘one can of course remove everything that could in any way extort from one a work of love’ and love still (WL 351). This sounds a little confusing, but it basically means: Loving one who’s dead never requires extortion, that is, no emotional blackmailing. Indeed, the dead are too busy being dead to guilt trip you to love them (which is not to say that another, someone living, cannot do so). The subtle point is as follows: ‘in connection with the living you can use many precautions, which perhaps will still not entirely protect you, but in connection with one who is dead you do not need the slightest precaution and you are still entirely protected’ (WL 352). To love the dead is to love them from within the comfort of not having to protect oneself from extortion. The closest thing to an extortion that the deceased could inflict upon you is simply to be forgotten to the flow of time—yet, the deceased could never ask to be remembered.

(3) Love is most faithful iff once all is removed, love still loves even without an object of faith (WL 355; had to paraphrase this one a bit). This is quite easy to grasp. Take a romantic relationship, suppose you break up, the object (i.e. your significant other) ceases to be an object of that love, and, in this case, the work of love ceases, albeit gradually at times. This is not the case with the deceased, for, again, they are very much dead. But why is this ‘most faithful’? For it is solely on you to love the deceased, who could never again change or respond to your works of love. If there emerges any alteration, it is on your behalf, you have changed. Conversely, to love the deceased is to possess ‘the ingenuity in thought, the firmness in expression, the strength in changelessness’ (WL 357), that is, faith, even though it appears ‘as if he [i.e. the deceased] had completely forgotten you and what you had said to him’ (WL 358).

Kierkegaard concludes: ‘The duty to love the people we see cannot cease because death separates them from us, because the duty is eternal; …’ (WL 358). It seems, then, that the love for a dead neighbour is the greatest love one could have for any neighbour at all. It is, after all, most unselfish, free, and faithful, as if anyone doesn’t think of their ideal relationship in this way. One could object that a dead person can’t be a neighbour, but as Kierkegaard writes, ‘the duty is eternal’. For one thing, the good Samaritan parable (Luke, 10:25-37) effectively defines a neighbour as anyone in need of help, as anyone to whom mercy could be given, and anyone offering that mercy; and, isn’t the deceased fully at the mercy of the loving recollection of the living not to be forgotten to time? Or, symmetrically, if you can be a neighbour to a dead person, the latter is your neighbour. As such, perhaps, a corpse is the best neighbour there could be. 

But not so quickly, for Kierkegaard adds: ‘… but accordingly neither can the duty to those who are dead separate the living from us in such a way that they do not become the objects of our love’ (WL 358). Regardless of the status of the works of love in recollecting the deceased, it is not equivalent to an unhealthy obsession with the deceased in what Freud would call ‘melancholia’. A dead neighbour is, hence, the best neighbour in this (everyday) sense, but the ‘best’, as far as Christianity is concerned, does not form a hierarchy for the works of love between human beings, for all neighbours are neighbours, first and foremost, beneath God and amidst the Holy Spirit. Or, in Kierkegaard’s words, between all neighbours, dead or living, ‘God is the middle term’ (WL 58), and when you recognise this, ‘you will be unable to escape what Christianity wants you to understand—human equality’ (WL 77; trans. mod.). It doesn’t matter if a neighbour is the best in any sense, they are simply a neighbour.

Back to Žižek. Following Lacan, for him, the neurotic’s desire (which is to say, most people’s desire) is ‘to be the object of the Other’s desire, not the object of his enjoyment’ (PF 44). To desire is not to be used for another’s enjoyment, but to be desired by another. But the enjoyment of being desired is not a fixed attribute, enjoyment is always excessive to the point of self-inversion, a surplus that always directs itself forward, that is, what is sometimes called ‘jouissance’. It is not enough to be desired once and for all; there’s no fun in being desired and desiring when it’s easy to do so. In other words, to the extent that the deceased can’t hurt you, they can’t desire you, and you can’t desire them (unless, as Žižek notes, you’re a necrophile). Thus, there is no enjoyment here with them—to love the deceased is to desire in a perfectly sanitised and clean way, which is not to desire at all. Yet, a love without desire, isn’t this the purest love there is? The most unconditional, and, indeed, the most unselfish, free, and faithful, to love without desire, without enjoyment.

As such, insofar as one desires, one wouldn’t desire to be the object of love of the kind that belongs to the deceased, even if such a love is most unselfish, free, and faithful. Žižek’s point, therefore, is that the seemingly perfect object of tolerance (the best neighbour, a corpse) is very much intolerable. To love, and be loved, in an unharassed, sanitised way means to love and be loved as a corpse, not as living, nor, thereby, as desiring. Against seeking a cadaverous relationship, Žižek writes: ‘The most difficult thing is not to violate the prohibitions in a wild orgy of enjoyment, but to do this without relying on someone else who is presupposed not to enjoy so that I can enjoy: to assume my own enjoyment directly, without mediation through another’s supposed purity’ (PV 91). What Žižek points out is, therefore, not ‘Kierkegaard’s insight’, but rather the converse thereof: Unless one is in love with a corpse, one’s love is never unconditional, pure, or sanitised, it is dirty, mean, and frustrated, which is yet precisely why desire desires.

Kierkegaard would agree that to love one who is alive naturally means not to practice the most unselfish, free, and faithful works of love (his own relationship with Regine Olsen should attest to this). Why would he write a chapter on the works of love for the deceased, if it is no different from neighbour-love in general? There’s a slight difference between the two, however. Subjects, dead or alive, desiring or not, are, for Kierkegaard, still neighbours. Even if one cannot love another living person in the most unselfish, free, and faithful way, one’s duty to the other remains to love them as a neighbour, which, again, has no hierarchy. As Kierkegaard writes: ‘Shut your eyes and remember the commandment that you shall love; then you love—your enemy—no, then you love the neighbor, because you do not see that he is your enemy’ (WL 68). Kierkegaard probably doesn’t see neighbourly love as dirty, mean, or frustrated in any sense. YET, read some of his journal entries on Regine, and—wouldn’t you guess it—Kierkegaard is the exemplar of a dirty, mean, and frustrated person! One should recall that he initially planned for the protagonist in his Repetition to die like Goethe’s Werther. Also, why would ‘love thy neighbour’ be a commandment, if one, first and foremost, precisely cannot love another as neighbour? But this is not to say that one ought not love another as a neighbour. To love a living human being is not to love a ‘good’ neighbour, for that would be a corpse, it is to love as if they are your neighbour regardless of whether they are ‘good’ or not (they are probably not). Thus, whilst Kierkegaard wouldn’t completely agree with Žižek, he would probably recognise himself in what the latter says.

References:

Kierkegaard, S. 1995. Works of Love [WL]. Princeton University Press.

Žižek, S. 2006. The Parallax View [PV]. MIT Press.

Žižek, S. 2008. The Plague of Fantasy [PF]. Verso.