To Love Without Memory: Seeds of a Christian Atheism in Deleuze and Kierkegaard

In this article I expand upon Deleuze’s injunction to ‘become capable of loving without memory’, reading the thought of Søren Kierkegaard and Gilles Deleuze as laying the foundations for a view that I call ‘Christian Atheism’. This is founded upon four basic principles: (1) God is love; (2) God-Love is neither a person nor a substance; (3) God-Love is the immanent, not transcendent, cause of all things; (4) God-Love is not a moral judge, but implies an ethical comportment, calling us forth in the love of self and in the love of the other or the love of the neighbour. I look first to Kierkegaard’s understanding of God as love, drawing comparisons with Deleuze’s notion of Being as affirmation. I then expand upon Kierkegaard’s God-Love through the sacrificial structural relation between renunciation and return as discussed in Fear and Trembling, before using this to expand upon Deleuze’s understanding of love without memory.