in Patrick Stokes and Adam Buben (eds) Kierkegaard and Death (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011)
Critics of Works of Love have seen that book's claim that the "work of love in remembering one who has died" represents the "the most unselfish, freest and faithful love" as emblematic of everything that is wrong with Kierkegaardian ethics: "he demands," according to Adorno, "that love behave towards all men as if they were dead." Many have sought to defend Kierkegaard on the basis that he offers remembrance of the dead not as a morally valuable practice in itself, but as a heuristic device for checking and calibrating our relationships with the living. But as I argue in this paper, Kierkegaard does indeed think remembrance is a genuine duty to (not merely regarding) the dead, even though the dead are "no more." Drawing on Kierkegaard's work more broadly, I outline the property of morally-charged phenomenal 'co-presence' with the dead that allows deceased persons to persist as moral patients. The account of remembrance that emerges is, I claim, one that captures many important aspects of our practices of mourning and commemoration.