Abstract

Love as Memory
Ethical and Political Dimensions in the Philosophy of Hegel and Levinas

December 11-12, 2014
SWIP Conference

In this planned lecture, the relationship between love and memory will constitute a point of departure for bringing Hegel and Levinas into dialogue. In contrast to Hegel, Levinas sees love as constituting not unification but withdrawal. Whereas a complementary gender model is at the center of Hegel’s understanding of love, Levinas emphasizes the irreconcilable difference between the subject and object of love.

When Hegel, in his preface to the Phenomenology of the Spirit, contends – "Daran mitzuarbeiten, daß die Philosophie der Form der Wissenschaft näherkomme – dem Ziele, ihren Namen der Liebe zum Wissen ablegen zu können und wirkliches Wissen zu sein –, ist es, was ich mir vorgesetzt" - , this program means that philosophy could unfold according to the measure of our understanding of reality—an understanding that might well be hindered by our understanding of love. In contrast, Levinas assumes that philosophy is not the love of knowledge—as the conventional translation of the word would have it—but knowledge in the service of love. This "wisdom of love, at the service of love" has a double orientation to reality, described by Levinas in Totality and Infinity as the "ambiguity of love" and this can be seen in connection with his axiom of the "unpredictability of history".

Inscribing oneself into a tradition and yet positioning oneself into a relationship to the Other(s) implies the capability to remember, which is linked to the theme of love. Regarding this link to tradition, Hegel and Levinas exhibit both divergences and overlaps. As differently as they develop the theme of love, both of them underscore the necessity of a remembering love and/or a loving remembrance as answer to the soul’s agitations. However, for Levinas—as opposed to Hegel—loving remembrance is not an answer to historical agitations. Levinas’ understanding of memory indebted to his active investigation of 20th-century totalitarianism. Memory has as its primary goal not dogmatic fixation, but above all the loosening of (love and hate) bonds to the past—without denying reflection on the past. It thus stands in the sign of the memorial, but also a new orientation and an "unpredictability of history".