a vow to the other

A Levinisian Reflection on Proximity

Can we live without tenderness? Yet to live without tenderness is to live without love. And to live without love is not to live at all.

And let me tell you I could not live without tenderness because I love you.

I love you not because of truth. My love exceeds the parameters of logic and cognition. It is outside the territory of reason, exterior to boundaries of themes and totalities. It is beyond my grasp, beyond my comprehension. It is more than what concepts in this world can ever convey.

I love you as I make contact with your absolute singularity. It is a contact transcending space, excluding representations and intentionality. My love does not require your physical closeness. I love you still even if we are million miles apart, for you are the basis of my being me. I could never be me without you. With our contact, our proximity, overflows this tenderness and responsibility saying you are my infinity and I am yours infinitely.

I love you with the pure approach of touch holding no intentions, no motives. In our caress lies proximity not on a par with the manifestation of things “in flesh and bones” or from the sense of existence and non-existence (p.118). In our proximity presents a primordial communication of tenderness found in the majesty of your face and the nudity of your skin.  It is “between the pure and troubled” (p.118), leaving an immediate tracebeyond the role of knowledge. In the tenderness of our contact is a kerygma, a proclamation that has no room for thought, a “departure with no return” (p.92), that I instantaneously hold myself ever morally responsible for you.

I love you with a love that escapes themes. My touch is beyond the data of reason and rationality. No science can ever explain the enigma and paradox of this feeling. For my love is without concepts, it can never be locked up with definitions and terminologies. My touch, my caress is outside thematic understanding that no prison of totality can ever capture.

I love you without need. To need is “the anxiety of the I for itself” (p. 94)and I’m not for a world that is for myself. In my love and responsibility for you, I am emptied of myself. The purest love lacks nothing. I desire you in your purest alterity with no needs, no demands. The nakedness of your face summons me—a summon I cannot escape. In your face I lost anything that can be manifested and comprehended. Your face awakens my obsession—“a responsibility without a choice, a communication without phrases or words” (p.120).

I love you with a love that is restless. Your summons to my very being speaks of immeasurable urgency to always answer, to always love. I love you not of intuition but of immediacy. However this immediacy is not aiming to be contemporaries with the triumph of our love,instead it is having no time for reflection. Consiousness with reflection is to return to the self. Yet without you, there will never be me. It is as if I’m always hungry for a responsibility towards you that can never be satisfied. Here I am, caught up willingly in my insatiable desire to make contact, to caress, to touch.

I love you as a genuine enigma. In your glorious face I rediscover the traces of my obsession, the traces that can never be concretized in the materiality and context of this world. It is a mystery thatdisturbs every order I ever know, showing me the generosity of sacrifice, the purity of love.Our love is not a phenomenon, but traces of a passing that was never present, for I love you with a love that disturbs order—a lovethat transcends this world.

I love you with infinite pardon and boundless compassion. The absolute force of your face proclaims the trace of an absence—the trace of infinity that gravitates me to be responsible for you, with your pain and sorrow, with your agony and misery. It is a love that seeks more than justice, but an intimacy that forgives endlessly.

I love you because my humanity depends on loving you. I love you because you are my salvation. It is a love that’s different from the deceptions of eros and delusions of narcissism. My love is a one-way movement towards you. It does not aim to be reciprocated. It does not require conditions, only absolute patience. For I love you in a liturgical orientation. It is a love without remuneration and compensation, assured in the indifference of my time and death. It is a pure transport without returning back to myself for I will still love you “in a time without me, in a time after my time” (p.92).

I love you because you are my meaning. My encounter with you is the sense of living. You are the command that calls me into question. And I welcome you to command me to be commanded byyou. This is mymoral responsibility for you, an inextinguishable fire of desire that extends to infinity.

I love you as an obsession. My obsession towards you embraces the responsibility that of proximity—“a bond prior to every chosen bond” (p.123). In this bond, in this relationship with you, I am your hostage. I surrender to you myself. I submit my whole being to you without asking anything in return. For that is how love should be, an absolute acceptance of our difference, of your inassimilable alterity. I do not have second thoughts, or any thoughts at all,for there is no other choice. The only truth I know is that you are my eternity.

I love you beyond my being. I love you beyond my world. I love you beyond my death. I love you this way because I don’t know any other way of loving, but only through this infinite tenderness and obsession.

*Alphonso Lingis trans., Collected PhilosophicalPapers: Emmanuel Levinas, (Martin Nijhoff Publishers: Dordrecht Netherlands, 1987).