"Like a virgin": Levinas's anti-Platonic understanding of love and desire

ENArticle is divided into three parts. First, I outline transformations in the understanding of love through philosophical tradition from Plato to Levinas, exploring Levinas’s anti-Platonic understanding of love via the relationship between knowledge and love. This relationship is asymmetrical: knowledge functions in the name of love, but love does not function in the name of knowledge. Love is not knowledge but instead entails knowledge. As love of wisdom, knowledge serves in the name of love. The open question here is: how can Platonic love of wisdom or Levinasian ethical desire have the ability to respond to social, political, and cultural challenges - a question I will come back to in the last section. In the second section, I discuss the relationship between love and desire. As opposed to desire, which is explicitly bound to the Desired, along with some ideal position vis-a-vis that person, love possesses a plethora of connotations that often render it vague. Love is bound not only to the self but to other persons - as well as to objects, facts, attitudes, situations, ideas, institutions, cultures, and even governments. Desire, on the other hand, is a stronger term than the timeworn and much-abused word “love.” It entails a stronger orientation toward the Other with a temporal, prospective - connotation: in the horizon of desire, the Other is “not yet,” the Other is future in the present. For Levinas, the delineation of “not-yet”-ness is a central feature for describing alterity and virginity.My central question in the third section is on how sensual love and ethical desire relate to Levinas’s description of the relationship between “intimate” and “real” society. I will show that it is particularly Levinas’s introduction of the figure of the Third that makes it possible to finally overcome the Platonic dualism between individuality and generality. In both erotic love and in ethical desire, the figure of the Third is decisive for exploring Levinas’s understanding of justice. The figure of the Third is not only a witness of the truth between the subject and a desiring Other but also a precondition for establishing this truth. Therefore, it is not necessary to see but to hear the claims of the Third, as well the claims of the Desired.