Love Strong as Death: Towards Another Finitude
Love Strong as Death: Towards Another Finitude

Summary/Abstract: The essay focuses on love as a characteristic marker of a finite existence and its inherent relationship with others. Against the thanatophilic thought of Martin Heidegger, who defined human life as being-towards-death, the author would like to develop a philosophy of love which is, at the same time, an alternative philosophy of finitude. In order to do so, she evokes the Jewish concept of ahava which cannot be reduced either to the Greek sublimatory eros or the Christian agape. The author understands ahava as a way in which finite contingent life says yes to itself as a life, and not as a short-lasting moment of being, dead the very moment it gets born (as in Schopenhauer.s famous pun: natus est denatus). She also claims that there is a specifically Jewish conception of the love of the neighbour, which cannot be conflated with the Christian one and which implies its own rendering of both ‘love’, constituting an alternative to death, and ‘the neighbour’, constituting the truly singular other.

• Details
• Contents