Levinas, Nosferatu, and the Love as Strong as Death

Abstract

Love is not stronger than death. In Death and Time (La Mort et le temps, 1991) Levinas reminds us that, contrary to how it is often quoted or remembered, The Song of Solomon says that love is as strong as death not stronger than it (Levinas 1991, 119). Love does not conquer death, it does not give to loss a sense which makes it bearable. And yet Levinas goes on to describe the claim that love is stronger than death as a ‘privileged formula’ (Levinas 1991, 120; my translations throughout), suggesting that even if it is not true it is worth saying and believing all the same. He refers to deliberately paradoxical formulations by Vladimir Jankelevitch according to which love, thought, freedom and God are all stronger than death, whilst death is also stronger than all of them (Levinas 1991, 119–20, quoting Jankelevitch 1966, 383, 389). So Levinas suggests that love is stronger than death, death is stronger than love, and each is as strong as the other. There is no triumph of one over the other. Against Heidegger, Levinas insists that the death which concerns me is not my own so much as that of the beloved other. The death of the beloved makes of me a guilty survivor, bereft of the possibility of dialogue with the deceased. But even as I am torn apart in grief, death does not conquer love any more than love conquers death. Death is not pure nothingness; something persists. Love is as strong as death. If ever there were a film about love and death, and (I want to argue) if ever there were a film fit to speak to Levinas’s most pressing concerns, it is F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), the first known film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The film