Author: Celine Leon
Publisher: Mercer University Press – 285 pages
Book Review by: Deekay Daulat

The Danish existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, unlike other philosophers, was not hesitant in discussing engagement, love, marriage, sexual and related matters from personal perspectives. He didn’t limit his viewpoints on these subjects to societal perspectives, Celine Leon states in her Conclusion on this possibly one-of-a-kind book.

She quotes French historian Genevieve Fraisse as writing that Kierkegaard didn’t hesitate to discuss these matters “from the subjective position of the individual singularly engaged in a sexual relation.” That is what set Kierkegaard apart from other writers on the sexual difference between men and women, the relationships between them, women’s uniqueness, and even superiority in some respects over men, the author points out in this important work

In The Neither / Nor of the Second Sex – A comprehensive and critical account of Kierkegaard’s thoughts on women, sexual difference and men-women relations, Leon explores Kierkegaard’s writings and draws some conclusions on that famous thinker’s perspectives that add to our knowledge of his life, his thinking, and sexual aspects of our lives.

For those interested in sexuality and exploring women’s personal thoughts on it, this book is a must-read because it appears that no other philosopher wrote about such matters the way Kierkegaard did. It can broaden the way you think about yourself and your relationships with the opposite sex – your wife or husband; your girlfriend or boyfriend.

Here’s an overview of the coverage of this book, which is organized in four parts and eight chapters. The titles of the chapters are written below the title of each Part:

Part One – The Aesthetic
Woman’s Difference
The (In)Difference of Seduction

Part Two – The Ethical
Marriage
The Woman’s Place within the Ethical

Part Three – The No Woman’s Land in Kierkegaard’s Exceptions
The Aesthetical-Ethical Collision
The Ethical-Religious Collision

Part Four – The Religious
Woman and the feminine: Can “Less” be “More”?
Restored (In)Difference

To find differences in the thinking between Kierkegaard and others on the topics covered in this book, the author read the works of other well-known (and not-so-notable) philosophers, poets, essayists and writers, among whom are:

Simone de Beauvoir, Charlotte, Bronte, Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, Johann Goethe, G.W.F. Hegel, Henrik Ibsen, Norman Mailer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato, Jean-Paul Sartre, Shakespeare, John Steinbeck and Virginia Woolf. These and many others’ books and articles are listed in the 10-page Works Consulted section at the end of this book.

An important point Celine Leon makes about Kierkegaard’s three spheres is this: “Whereas the authorship’s three existence spheres determine and exhaust all the possible ways in which the first sex can relate to the second – seduction and abandonment for the aesthetic, marriage for the ethical, and abstinence for the religious – its repetitions are repetitions that glaringly exclude woman and sexual difference. No sphere is in effect exempt from indifference.”

Celina Leon co-edited (with Sylvia Walsh) Feminist Interpretations of Soren Kierkegaard (1997). Her many articles on the subject of French existentialism have appeared both in France and the United States. She has presented  scholarly papers on various subjects at national and international colloquia (Sorbonne, Oxford University, Trinity College, Dublin, University of Copenhagen) and is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants.

This is a unique book that can expand the horizons of your thinking on relationships and sexuality. Celine Leon has explored deeply and commented frankly on Kierkegaard’s and other writers’ works as they relate to sexual differences between men and women and how they think about each other.