Marion, Love, and Nihilism: A Dialogue with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Nishitani

The foundation of this book is the work of Jean-Luc Marion, who writes at length about the problems of vanity and nihilism and offers an answer in love, specifically Christian love. A complication that arises, however, is that Marion argues that love is absent in the respective responses to nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger--two figures who play a key role in the development of his thought, and who also have their own notions of love. In Marion, Love, and Nihilism, Matthew C. Kruger explores this series of questions by providing first an overview of the responses to nihilism found in these figures, then a close reading of Marion’s thoughts on the matter before moving to accounts of the concept of love in Nietzsche and Heidegger. The book then finishes with a further critique of Marion’s work, relying on the thought of Nishitani Keiji. Kruger argues that, while Marion correctly identifies an answer in love (as did Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Nishitani, in their own ways), Marion’s thought ends in world-denial and thus fails find a complete answer to nihilism.

Matthew C. Kruger is associate professor in the theology department at Boston College.