An Ethics of Love – Epigraph
This is why through the face
filters the obscure light
coming from beyond the face,
from what is not yet,
from a future never future enough,
more remote than the possible.
Tag: An Ethics of Love
Essay Series
With Levinas, the philosopher becomes a weaver, the inceptive energy that slowly disappears behind a thread, a textile, a text that takes form through the very act of weaving, and not in response to a pre-planned mental scenario. The reader expecting an erudite, ‘neutral’ of theoretical demonstration giving its due to a pantheon of other philosophical authorities, would thus face some disappointment upon reading this essay. The audience only eager to hear what is nothing but a story may enjoy it slightly more.
An Ethics of Love – Part 1.1
Levinas writes about the encounter of the Other as a ‘perturbation’ or ‘interruption’ of our everyday human experience. The Other is not only the shelter, or the incarnated form, of the Infinite. It is, for Levinas, what complexifies our spontaneous understanding of time itself. Time is what gets interrupted by the Other…
An Ethics of Love – Part 1.2
French language contains one interesting expression, which we could borrow to further discuss the encounter of the loved Other in and after Levinas: the point de fuite. Levinas does not make a use of this expression. The point de fuite is principally a technical term, belonging to the field of photography and visual art…
An Ethics of Love – Part 1.3
While this question could certainly meet no satisfactory answer in the case of visual arts, our intention here is to speculate a few ideas in the analogous case of the loved Other. To permit this, we must first realize that this spatial model applies to two moments of the relation to the loved Other…
An Ethics of Love – Part 1.4
But this escape is flexible, moving, almost plastic. Once the visual or perceptive encounter is consumed, once the interaction with a lover-to-be has become a proper relationship of love, the relationship of a couple recognizing itself as exclusive couple, for them and for the rest of their surrounding community, the dynamic changes…
An Ethics of Love – Part 2
The loved Other is external to me. She is what comes before me, in front of my eyes, just like my near future is before me, unveiling before my mere observation. The loved Other is the one who will call for all my hopes and expectations. Hope (espoir in French) is a wait (esperar in Spanish), that is, hope is irremediably a turn to the future…
An Ethics of Love – Part 3
The extent of inspiration from the Jewish tradition is particularly visible throughout Levinas’s œuvre. Some of his later works are, precisely, Talmudic commentaries. But the ‘metaphysics’, or the ‘flavour’ of the Semitic is already perceptible, even in his more ‘secular’ works of phenomenology…
An Ethics of Love – Overture
In place of a conclusion: an overture. Indeed: would separation, the death of love, be the necessary conclusion of love? Is love bound to follow the path of deceit, solitude and separation that we have drawn here?…