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.