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O My Neighbors, There Is No Neighbor, Harris B. Bechtol

All Faculty Scholarship

This article meditates on the Christian command to love the neighbor as yourself by focusing on how both Jacques Derrida and Søren Kierkegaard have read this command. I argue that Derrida, failing in his faithfulness to Kierkegaard, makes a mistake when he includes this command in the Greek model of the politics of friendship in his Politics of Friendship. Such a mistake is illumined by Kierkegaard’s understanding of the neighbor in this command from Works of Love because this understanding helps to develop Derrida’s vision of a democracy and politics that resists the hegemony of the masculine and remains …