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…
Tag: Existentialism
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?…
An Ethics of Love – Annex
Why? Why, and how? Why should I talk, today, in this place, about love? Why love, and why the ethics of love? How could I manage to mention, in 15 minutes, more than what we all already know about love? Is love even a philosophical question?…
Two Frenchmen in the Orient – Part 3
Since I have been abroad, quite a few travelers have gotten in touch with me. Whether friends who had promised (often in vain) to pay me visit, or complete strangers, they show an enthusiasm that reminds me, not without nostalgia, of my early days here…
The Language of Foreignness – Introduction
“I could not live in India: I don’t know the language.” Foreign language is for many the first thing to which foreignness is synonymous. Being a foreigner would mean not just living in a foreign country, but more immediately, more stressfully, living in a different and foreign linguistic environment…
The Language of Foreignness – Part 1.1
Asking a foreigner for a definition of the foreigner is a guarantee of failed objectivity. My status as a foreigner, and further, my particular historical and spatial context, as well as my experiences as a foreigner, necessarily influence my intellectualizations of this situation…
The Language of Foreignness – Part 1.2.1
In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) argues that human life is profoundly marked by its existence in time. The human being (Dasein, “being-there”) is “thrown in the world” (Sein-in-der-Welt), a world which is in time. Temporality is a source of angst and worry since it is the plane of realization of the fundamental incompletion of Dasein…