anamnesis

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).