“What Is More Wonderful?”: Existential Violence, Gender, Freedom, and Erotic Love beyond Levinasian Ethics

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2024
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Haverford College. Department of Philosophy
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
Emmanuel Levinas famously declared that love is the negation of ethical society, that love constitutes a collapse of the ethical constraints and demands that the face of the Other makes upon the Self. This project takes his claim as a starting point for examining the socially contingent factors that distinguish what I term the romantic-erotic face-to-face, between lovers, from the social-ethical face-to-face, between Levinasian neighbors. If we take Levinas’s and Beauvoir’s notion that transcendence and self- actualization are promised to us in the face of the Other, then something has gone wrong if we simultaneously believe that a love relation, which delivers heightened proximity to the Other, is the negation of the possibility for self-realization. First, I will examine the (self-)destructive dynamics that contribute to ethical amputation in romantic-erotic encounters, looking at both gender and romantic love through a cross-analysis of heterosexual relationships. Next, I will argue that the mutilated woman, whose free, transcendent subjectivity is obscured by sociopolitically contingent factors, becomes assimilable into the masculine in love relations. By becoming all-object or less-than-object via objectification, abjection, mystification, and other forms of what I am calling “existential violence,” women and feminized individuals are rendered partial and thus are able to be possessed, without concerns of justice, by the masculine Other, who is positioned as the Same—indeed, as the Only. This conclusion leads us to the third and final section of this project, which takes Sylvia Plath’s “undesirable impossibility” of fusion as a jumping-off point for imagining an “ethical love” that transcends the social factors that lead to existential violence. I aim in this final section to synthesize the imaginative claims of Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks, Sylvia Plath, and several other writers about love into a complete picture of an ethical love, free from othering and objectification, as an invaluable tool for self-actualization. I hope to dispel the notion that we must choose between justice and love and propose rather that love is a particular, privileged form of sociality that surpasses ethics into a mutual obligation to not only respect, but to actively take up the existential adventure of the Other in a fluid, trusting balance.
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