An Ascetic on Love

On Niklas Luhmann’s Love Story and on the Circumstances of the Birth of the Life Work

The first part of Márk Áron Éber’s article aims to provide a “guidebook” how to read the first book from Luhmann’s rich life-work that became published (partly) in Hungarian translation, the Liebe als Passion (Szerelem – szenvedély, Love as Passion). First, Éber briefly introduces the author, then sketches out the theoretical frame that makes the production and interpretation of the particular love story possible, in order to clarify why Luhmann considers love a “symbolically general communicational medium”, a “semantic”. The second part of the article reconstructs Luhmann’s working methods as a researcher, theorist. This helps to point out that the construction of Luhmann’s theory and concepts can be brought into a new perspective if we also account that in the personality of Luhmann we can find an ascetic who wrote (beside various other topics) about love, and was, in fact, in love with work and writing.

Released: Replika 66, 125–138.