A Levinisian Reflection on
Love and Infinity
Have you ever loved someone so deep that sometimes it hurts? Have you
ever loved someone so passionately that sometimes it consumes you? Have you
ever loved someone with a love you can’t contain? There are times you question
your pain. On other times you question
your love. But are there really different ways of loving that you put yourself
into a category? Is love just a surge of emotions that overwhelms your being? Haven’t
you asked the most important question ever formulated—the question that of
love?
What is LOVE? How is it to truly love? I used to believe in destiny and
fate and stories written in the stars.I used to think that among eight billion
people in the planet, there would be this one person who would love me and I
would love in return. Most of the times I question why this hasn’t happen yet. And this is where I’m wrong.
You see, true love never questions. More often in our lives we linked the concept
of love to romantic love. Maybe because it’s easier that way, it appeals to our
emotions.But Eros deceives. It projects this image of being unconditional and
selfless, when in truth; it lives in the world of needs existing for the self. It
gives us finite experience of pleasure but not eternalizing joy.
Loving someone means wanting that love to last. It makes you want to
believe in forever and eternity, for love can only exist in infinity. It’s very
possiblity lies in the idea of the infinite (p.164). Love is beyond the fallacy
of eros and delusions of narcissism. In fact, it is the very possibility of the
beyond. To live beyond oneself is to live your life for others. In the words of
the master of comedy:“these are the people who pass their whole lives together;
yet they could not explain what they desire for one another” (p.164). For this
desire is a genuine enigma,prior to anything that can be manifested and
represented, prior to presence and truth. It is transcendent to this world,
disinterested to immanence. For love is without concepts, it dwells into the
obscure, into the shadow.
To love is without reasons. You just love. Period. It’s the most
irrational thing. When you can conceptualize and rationalize every detail of
loving someone, surely that is not love, for one can never finitize love
through reasons. And this mystery of irrationality is beautiful in its own
right. How can you represent something immemorial? You can’t. And that’s how
love is. No context can ever wholy capture its meaning. It is outside the
bounds of totality, it is infinity.
In such love you are awaken to proximity. In such love you are a hostage.
The I is “under the accusation of the other, even though it be
faultless...obeying a command before having heard it, faithful to the
commitment it never made” (p.165).Through your contact with the other lies your
responsibility. It’s tenderness more primordial than any words can ever
convey.In this touch, this proximity is the absolute expression of freedom, of
morality, of love.
To love someone is to accept that person, as he is, no assumptions, no correlations. You accept that you are different. When you accept his absolute
individuality, his alterity, without reducing him to your notion of self, then
you open yourself to infinity.The other cannot be assimilated, aslove cannot be
totalized. It is exterior to thematization. In here, love is not ontological.
It is beyond being. I no longer believe in “til death do us part”, for to love
infinitely is to go beyond one’s death, to still love in a time after one’s
time. To love is to go beyond the ego for the self is a limiting prison, for the
I constrains in loving infinitely.
To feel infinitely for someone is not to judge that person. You do not
see him as evil. Though the other may
indeed have some excess at some points of their lives, the challenge is how to
tame that excess, how to transcend it. You do not judge him for the decisions
he made. You will not give up on that person precisely because you love him. In
your journey through life, you will encounter people that do not live perfect
lives. For some of them, you’ll feel infinitely for. And in that situation, you
just love with a love that don't demand. It’s a love that understands, that
forgives endlessly. And even in the point
that you have to go separate ways, that infinite responsibility will never
change, proximity is still there. In our relationships and encounters with the
other we accept that it’s not a smooth sailing road. There are both good and
bad things along the way. Still, take it because that’s how love is, pure
submission. Every moment of taking that chance to love is a moment that endures
infinitely.
To love is to not seek pleasure or the good. It is beyond hedonism and
eudaimonia. It “does not fill me up with goods, but compels me to goodness,
which is better than goods received” (p.165). This love is your infinite
responsibility for the other, for your neighbor. This is the very impossibility
of indifference. You can never ignore the misery felt by the other; you can
never be deaf to his call. Your responsibility transcends limits. It is the
ultimate meaning of immeasurable urgency to act for the other, to subject
oneself to him. It is desire turned into action. No contract can ever fix the
boundaries of this obligation. You are irreplaceable in this responsibility for
no one can escape the force of a naked face calling you, choosing you. In the
encounter with the other, infinity reveals itself.
Loving someone is like a covenant. You render yourself vulnerable for the
other. In loving the other, you allow yourself to be transformed. You
selflessly surrender yourself to the other without expectations of any
renumeration. Infinity is in the naked face of the other; it is in his nude
skin. You see in him a trace of something primordial. It’s a feeling of
“permanent losing and finding again” (p.114), a rediscovery.
Again, if I was asked what is love? Maybe I’ll still answer this: I used
to believe in destiny and fate and stories written in the stars. I used to
think that among eight billion people in the planet, there would be this one
person who would love me and I would love in return. Most of the times, I used
to question why this hasn’t happen yet.
Yes, I used to. But now I choose to believe otherwise. Sometimes what we
were waiting for is right here all along. It just took us a little while to
rediscover the traces of a passing that never was—the traces of infinity.
*Alphonso Lingis trans., Collected Philosophical Papers: Emmanuel
Levinas, (Martin Nijhoff Publishers: Dordrecht Netherlands, 1987).
