Emmanuel Levinas Quotes on Love

Levinas's analysis of love in Totality and Infinity (1961) — the section on the phenomenology of eros — and in the closely related discussions of paternity and fecundity develops a distinctive alternative to the post-Hegelian recognition tradition. Erotic love is not the fusion of two consciousnesses into a higher unity (the dialectic of recognition) nor the mutual gaze of two free subjects (the existentialist alternative) but the asymmetric encounter with the feminine other whose alterity precisely cannot be reduced to a common genus shared with the lover. The framework integrates with Levinas's broader ethics-as-first-philosophy: love is one mode of the ethical relation to the other rather than a relation that competes with the ethical, and the late writings on the Talmudic readings extend the analysis through Jewish theological resources.