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Document Details : Title: From Utøya, with love Subtitle: Kleine genealogie van de liefde als politiek concept Author(s): DE KESEL, Marc Journal: Tijdschrift voor Theologie Volume: 53 Issue: 3 Date: 2013 Pages: 217-228 DOI: 10.2143/TVT.53.3.3203322 Abstract : ‘Greater love hath no man than this, than to lay down his life for his friends’. It is a well-known sentence from the gospel of John (15:13). Anders Breivik quotes this evocation of Christian love in his 2083, a megalomaniac ‘Compendium’ of more than 1500 pages, in which he legitimizes the bloodbath he caused on the isle Utøya on July 22, 2011. Facing the threat of islamization as well as the decadent deterioration of left-winged, multicultural politics (of which current islamization of Europe is but a symptom), we Europeans must put aside our personal interests and, if necessary, give our lives for the preservation and restoration of Europe. Europe needs love, says Breivik, sacrificial love. Despite its psychotic nature, Breivik’s manifesto is composed of ideas that belong to today’s common sense and that have their origin in the great political discourses of Western tradition. In his essay, Marc De Kesel presents a short genealogy of both ‘Europe’ as a political identity and ‘love’ as a political concept. Having a local and ‘hybrid’ (name for a ‘Lebanese’ girl from Tyrus, raped by the Greek Upper God, and indicating the land of the West in opposition to Asia, the land of the East) political origin, Europe becomes a proper political term only in the Middle Ages, when it indicated what was left of the Western Roman Empire. Unknown to the Romans as a political term, ‘love’ became the major term to express the relation of the citizen with his society only during the Christianization of the Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th century. This went hand in hand with that other central political metaphor installing its dominion in the same centuries: society as a ‘body’. All Christians were members of the same ‘body’, of which Christ was the head; and just as Christ gave his life to create and preserve that ‘body’, Christians were supposed to be ready to commit to a similar kind of ‘love’. That kind of ‘love’ has the Christian agape as its background, rather than the Greek eros. De Kesel’s essay ends with a reflection on the question whether the ‘love’ required by modern democratic politics is not precisely that old Greek idea of eros. |
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