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: Phenomenology
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?…
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 1.2.2
Two decades after Heidegger’s Being and Time, and not without the mediation of Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) attempted a profound application of the German fathers of phenomenology to one particular question: perception…
The Language of Foreignness – Part 1.2.3
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was contemporary to Merleau-Ponty, and directly influenced by Phenomenology: his first university works were on Husserl. The phenomenological heritage is perhaps not visible in the content of Derrida’s work – Derrida is not remembered for his use of the phenomenological method in any of his main studies – but in the form of the philosophical approach already adopted by Heidegger and by another direct inspiration of Derrida’s, Emmanuel Levinas…
The Language of Foreignness – Part 2.2
And as for the language, well I don’t know. English is comfortable, or rather, comforting. A foreign language, for the one who always found himself to be the foreigner. The easy foreign language, so foreign that it is even foreign to most people one encounters in India. Funny thing. And foreign to me, indeed. A safe terrain to express my thoughts…