The Philosophical Sense of Transcendence: Levinas and Plato on Loving Beyond Being

CONTENTS

vii CONTENTS List of Abbreviations xi Note on Translations xiii Acknowledgments xiv Introduction 1 PART I: THE GREEKS, BEING, AND TOTALITY ONE • Transcendence and Love in Plato 15 1.1 Plato’s Reality: Becoming, Being, and the Good Beyond Being 17 1.2 The Platonic Scale of Affectivities and the Nature of Erotic Love 24 1.3 Erotic Love, Transcendence, and Religion in the Greeks 45 TWO • The Darker Side of Being and the Sensibility of Suffering 53 2.1 Levinas’s Critique of Heidegger and Being as the Il y a 55 2.2 The Beginnings of Human Subjectivity on the Darker Side of Being 68 viii Contents THREE • The Lighter Side of Being and the Sensibility of Enjoyment 77 3.1 Worldly Being as Enjoyment and Light in the Early Levinas 80 3.2 Totality and Infinity and the Constitution of the Separated Subject 89 FOUR • Totality, Death, and Time 110 4.1 Western Philosophy and Totalizing Ontologies: Being without Transcendence 114 4.2 Death as the Key to Transcendence in Levinas 135 PART II: LOVE AND TRANSCENDENCE FIVE • Erotic Transcendence in Levinas’s Early Works 151 5.1 Erotic Love and Human Salvation 154 5.2 Erotic Love and Philosophical Sense: Phenomenology, Ontology, and Time 160 5.3 The Philosophical Sense of Erotic Transcendence and Plato 170 SIX • Transcendence and Desire in Totality and Infinity 176 6.1 Is Desire Affectivity or Thought? 178 6.2 Approaches to Desire Beyond Phenomenology and Ontology 188 SEVEN • “Beyond the Face”: Erotic Fecundity, Desire, and Transcendence 219 7.1 Eros, Fecundity, and Desire: Scholarly Readings 222 7.2 Erotic Love and Fecundity in Totality and Infinity 227 7.3 Erotic Love and Fecundity in Discussion with Plato 244 7.4 The Relation Between Erotic Fecundity and Desire 254 Contents ix EIGHT • Otherwise Than Being: Love and Transcendence in Levinas’s Later Works 263 8.1 Transcendence in its Purity: Love Without Eros, Trauma, and the Otherwise than Being 268 8.2 Transcendence and Philosophy: Thought, Ambiguity, and the Risk of Betrayal 286 8.3 Transcendence, Ethics, and Religion 297 CONCLUSION • The Question of the Philosophical Sense of Transcendence 305 Notes 321 Bibliography 355 Index 366 ...