Year: 2013

December 6, 2013

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.

December 6, 2013

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

December 6, 2013

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…

December 6, 2013

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…

December 6, 2013

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…

December 6, 2013

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…

December 6, 2013

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…

December 6, 2013

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?…

December 6, 2013

Justifying Corruption – Introduction
What have in common an Indian mole in Pakistan, an international arms agent and an alcohol mogul in North India? This rhetoric is clumsy but the point is even more evident: many, many would be all those who have corruption as their common denominator. A classical target of the utopian dreams of the Enlightenment Century, corruption is, four hundred years later, ubiquitous, present in multiple and complex forms all around the globe…

December 6, 2013

Justifying Corruption – Part 1
“The mafia doesn’t care about generating revenue for the government. In my case, I care a lot about the government. I run this business and add huge sums to the state exchequer.” — Ponty Chadha