In the Middle of Love: At the Fringes of Personhood. An Explorative Essay on the Dialogue of I and Thou and the Poetics of the Impersonal

Abstract

In Works of Love, Søren Kierkegaard introduces the idea that God’s love is “the middle term.” It is a love that manages to be in the middle of all created being. To that extent, love is not just one relation among others, but the “being-in-relation” as such. It is, in Heideggerian terms, “the with” of being-with. This implies, further, that the middle is as inconspicuous as it is ubiquitous. According to Martin Buber, however, there is a privileged relation to the middle in the I–Thou relation. It is here that it reveals itself. For Buber, this is so on the strength of two important traits of this dyadic relation: that it is dialogical and personal. It is in dialogue that I and You are responsive to the word of God; and it is in personal co-presence that the theophany of “the absolute person” may occur. This paper explores these tenets of “philosophy of dialogue” at their fringes. Accordingly, it explores the impersonal in the person and the monologue in dialogue. More specifically, it aims to show how: (a) the impersonal in the person is disclosed in love and angst and how (b) the monologue in dialogue is expressed in a poetics of the impersonal.