Longing for the Other: Levinas and Metaphysical Desire

NOTES

263 NOTES NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 1. Arnold, “The Buried Life,” italics mine. 2. Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 56–57. 3. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 73, 78; italics mine. 4. Ibid., 176. 5. Ibid., 16. 6. Shakespeare, “Anthony and Cleopatra,” act 5, scene 2, lines 281–82. 7. American Heritage Dictionary of English, s.v. “long.” 8. WordNet 3.0 (Princeton University, 2003), s.v. “longing,” http:// wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=longing. 9. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “longing,” 1131. 10. Ibid., 1131. 11. Ibid., 1131. 12. Ibid., 1131. 13. Ibid., 1131. 14. This reference to the infectious genesis of longing and its manifestation as a sickness will be developed in more detail later, especially in chapters 1, 4, and 5. 15. Herbert “The Temple,” old English spellings maintained. 16. Shakespeare “Sonnet 147.” 17. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 17; italics mine. 18. Wildhagen and Héraucourt German-English Dictionary, s.v. “Sehnsucht,” 1106. 19. Ibid., 1106. 20. Ibid., s.v. “Sucht,” 1175. 21. Deutsches Wörterbuch, s.v. “Sehnsucht,” 157. 22. Ibid., 157. 23. Ibid., 157. 24. Wildhagen and Héraucourt German-English Dictionary, s.v. “sucht,” 1175. 25. Ibid., s.v. “siechen,” 1116. As we shall see, this etymology is also noted by Heidegger. 26. Goethe, “Selige Sehnsucht,” 240: Tell a wise person or else keep silent For the masses will mock it right away I praise what is truly alive And what longs to be burned to death. In the calm waters of the love nights Where you were begotten, Where you have begotten, A strange feeling comes over you When you see the silent candle burning. Now you are no longer caught in this obsession with darkness And a desire for higher lovemaking sweeps you upward. Distance does not make you falter. And now, arriving in magic, flying and finally, insane for the light You are the butterfly. And you are gone. And so long as you haven’t experienced this, To die and so to grow, You are only a troubled guest on a dark earth. 27. See Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” 61. NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. As an interesting side note, Adriaan Peperzak reads Levinas’s phenomenological account of need here, and the distinction he will subsequently make between it and metaphysical desire, as in part a response to the concept of economy established in Kant’s practical philosophy (“Some Remarks on Hegel, Kant and Levinas,” 213). 2. Richard Cohen provides a rich read of Levinas’s employment of the Odyssian/Ulyssian narrative, especially as it pertains to the ethical life, and offering some interesting suggestions as to how it relates to many of the current conflicts the world is embroiled in today in his “Notes on the Title of Totality and Infinity,” 125. 264 Notes to Pages 9–22 3. Whether or not this is an accurate reading of the Odyssian tale is yet to be seen. One must remember that at the end of the Odyssey, though Odysseus has returned to Ithaca, he has not yet returned “home,” as expressed in Tennyson’s poem Ulysses wherein our “aged king” declares that he “cannot rest from travel.” Remember that at the end of the Odyssey Odysseus cannot yet settle in Ithaca, but must still travel on in a seemingly impossible journey to plant an oar in a land the inhabitants of which have never heard the name of Poseidon in order to appease his wrath. This is a seemingly impossible task of course, because to the Greeks the inhabitable world is circumscribed by the ocean making Poseidon’s realm global in proportion. This seemingly eternal delay of the eventual return home in the Odyssey gives it an entirely different meaning, one not so much about homecoming as about exile. 4. Spinoza, Ethics, 126. 5. Though examinations of nostalgia like that of Rudolf Bernet’s (see “Heimwee en Nostalgie”) would complicate this conclusion, indeed for Bernet nostalgia seems to contain a similar movement, we must remember that, for Levinas, nostalgia is a technical term. It is to the specificity of his use that we are referring here. 6. It is curious to note that, despite Plato being one of the most frequently and overtly treated of Levinas’s interlocutors, relatively little secondary literature has been written on this interaction (especially when compared to how much has been written on Levinas’s...