“For Love is as Strong as Death”

Abstract

Taking Another Look at Levinas on Love Set me as a seal upon your heart. For love is as strong as death. Shir Hashirim [Song of Songs] In "Questions to Emmanuel Levinas," Luce Irigaray criticizes Emmanuel Levinas's conception of love by claiming that for Levinas, "to caress consists not in approaching the other in its most vital dimension, the touch, but in the reduction of that vital dimension of the other's body to the elaboration of the future for himself."1 That is, Irigaray interprets Levinas's conception of love as that which needs to be redeemed by fecundity and which is only redeemed for the man. Levinas 's work, she charges, does not account for the female experience in sexuality, degrades the woman by rendering her experience in sexuality as that which is devoid of the divine, and finally, it maintains a structure that privileges heterosexuality. Irigaray's analysis of Levinas's work points to what might be considered the most damning elements of Levinas's thought, and her view needs to be taken seriously. However, I think there are alternative readings of Levinas's conception of the "feminine" in general and his description of love in particular. My goal in this essay is to re-examine Levinas's conception of love that we find in Totality and Infinity,2 while being mindful of Irigaray's worries about this conception. This task is completed in part by taking seriously Levinas's claim in the preface to Totality and Infinity that Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption is "a work too often present in this book [Totality and Infinity] to be cited" (TI 28/xvi).3 The Labor of Love In contrast to the ethical relationship, Levinas identifies the love relationship as a return to the same. Yet for Levinas, the role the feminine plays in making transcendence possible extends beyond the dwelling and into the erotic relationship. Following a structure that we find in both Sartre and Rosenzweig, Levinas's description of the love relationship is a relationship wherein what the lover wants is not just to love the other [the beloved], but to have the Beloved love him back.4 Love both presupposes the exteriority of the other while also going beyond this exteriority of the other, of the beloved (TI 254/232). Taking up the Aristophanes myth in Plato's Symposium, Levinas's view of love is a mixture of immanence and transcendence (TI 254/232). Levinas disagrees with the implication of fusion signaled by the myth.5 However, he does find compelling the ambiguous notion of love not only as a relation in which there is a return to the self, but also as a relation in which the self is transcended. The face of the other-of the beloved-reveals within it what is not yet. It reveals the future that is never future enough, a future that is "more remote than possible" (TI 254-55/232-33). Finally, the ambiguity of love lies in the possibility of the Other to appear as an object of need and yet still retain its alterity, "the possibility of enjoying the Other, of placing oneself at the same time beneath and beyond discourse." The love relation is ambiguous precisely because the ethical has not disappeared. Rather, the face of the Other is hidden by the erotic, by the intimacy of love. In the "Phenomenology of Eros" Levinas tells us that "love aims at the other; it aims at him in his frailty [faiblesse]" (TI 256/233). Love aims at the tenderness of the Beloved. For Levinas, the tenderness is not something added to the Beloved. Rather, the Beloved "is but one with her regime of tenderness" (TI 256/233).6Levinas's analysis continually uses language that presents the image of the Beloved cast below while the lover is taken to new heights. The Beloved is "dark," "nocturnal," "clandestine," "deep in the subterranean dimension" (TI 257/234). The Beloved equivocates between virginity 7 and profanation (or solicitation), between modesty and immodesty (TI 257-58/234-35), between hiddenness and exposure. …