The Subject of Love

The Subject of Love: Hélène Cixous and the Feminine Divine is about abundant, generous, other-regarding love. In the history of Western ideas of love, such a configuration has been inseparable from our ideas about divinity and the sacred; often reserved only for God; and rarely thought of as a human achievement.

This book is a substantial engagement with her philosophies of love, inviting the reader to reflect on the conditions of subjectivity that just might open us to something like a divine love of the other. Renshaw follows this thread in this genealogy of abundant love: the thread that connects the subject of love from 5th century B.C.E. Greece and Plato, to the 20th century protestant theology of agapic love of Anders Nygren, to the late 20th century poetico-philosophy of Hélène Cixous.

This study will be of particular interest to academics and students of the history of gender, cultural studies, criticism and gender studies