Levinas Between Agape and Eros
Levinas Between Agape and Eros CLAIRE KATZ, Texas A&M University Anders Nygren's Agape and Eros, first published in the 1930s, was a landmark treatment of the radical distinction between eros and agape.! Realizing that the Christian Bible makes large use of agape and little use of eros, Nygren seeks to understand why this is the case. Eros, Nygren tells us, is largely associated with Plato while agape is largely associated with Paul. Where eros is the desire to behold and participate in divine attributes, to make them part of oneself, agape is God's love freely bestowed on us. Although the most colloquial usage of eros does not point to a religious connotation, eros, like agape, is deeply religious in its original meaning, even as the two terms differ in significant ways. We can see remnants of this same discussion in the ethical project of Emmanuel Levinas, which became the subject of terrific criticism, pre cisely because he separated the ethical relation from the erotic experi ence. As a result, Levinas's commentators frequently compare Levinas's ethics to Christian agape. 2 Using the same distinction between agape and eros, even if implicitly, these commentators conclude that if Levinas distances the ethical relation from eros, his ethics must be like agape. Conversely, other commentators, for example, Luce Irigaray, prefer to bring together Levinas's ethics and eros while still maintaining some of the structure of Levinasian ethics. 3 That is, they are not satisfied with this separation, yet they are persuaded by some of the structure that identifies Levinas's ethical relation.
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