The Amorous Imagination: Individuating the Other-as-Beloved (SUNY Series in Contemporary French Thought)

In The Amorous Imagination , D. Andrew Yost builds upon Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of love to argue that through the interpretive activities of the imagination the Beloved appears to the lover as this Other, not the Other. Weaving together insights from Romantic thought and contemporary French philosophy, Yost describes the distinctive role the imagination plays in individuating another person so that they appear radically unique, special, and unsubstitutable. This radical uniqueness-or haecceitas -emerges out of the lovers' engagement in an "endless hermeneutic," an ongoing process of creative and responsive meaning-making that grounds the lovers' lives in each other and opens them up to new possibilities. All of this, Yost argues, is made possible by the amorous imagination. Drawing from the deep well of love poetry, mythology, philosophy, and literature The Amorous Imagination comes to the provocative conclusion that without the productive power of the imagination love itself could not emerge. Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction: Love, the Imagination, and the Other 12 Chapter 1 The Philosophy of Love: A New Opening 20 The Traditional Typology and the Romantic Turn 20 Sympathy, Will, and Imagination in Novalis’s Hymns to the Night 23 “Crystallization” as Amorous Imagination in Stendhal’s Love 26 Romantic Merging in Shelley’s “On Love” 27 Love and the Romantic Imagination: Some Preliminary Observations 30 Phenomenology and Empiricism 32 Varieties of Phenomenology 35 Edmund Husserl’s Eidetic Phenomenology 35 Martin Heidegger’s Hermeneutical Phenomenology 37 Emmanuel Levinas and the Limits of Phenomenology 38 Paul Ricoeur’s Linguistic Phenomenology 39 Jean‐Luc Marion’s Reduction to Givenness 40 A Romantic Phenomenology? 41 Chapter 2 The Lovers Emerge: Marion, Saturation, and Individuation 44 From the Other to the Beloved 44 Levinas and Marion: Ethics, Eros, and the Question of Individuation 45 Givenness 50 L’adonné 51 The Saturated Phenomenon 55 Four Categories of Saturated Phenomenon 56 The Event and Friendship: Saturation According to Quantity 57 The Idol: Saturation According to Quality 60 The Flesh: Saturation According to Relation 61 The Face: Saturation According to Modality 66 Individuation in The Erotic Phenomenon 68 The Lover’s Advance and The Crossing of Gazes 68 The Crossing of Flesh 73 The Adieu 75 Marion’s Phenomenology, Individuation, and the Amorous Imagination 76 Chapter 3 From The Other to This Other: Individuation and Imagination 82 Key Features of the Imagination 82 The Imagination’s Productive and Reproductive Capacities 83 The Imagination’s Hermeneutical Structure 85 The Imagination’s Creative‐Responsive Activity 86 The Imagination is Embodied 88 The Imagination as a Mode of Consciousness 90 The Imagination and Individuation: A Preliminary Sketch 93 Love and the Endless Hermeneutic 94 Chapter 4 The Amorous Event and the Endless Hermeneutic 96 From the Lover’s Advance to the Beloved’s Givenness 96 The Hermeneutical Structure of Events 97 The Amorous Event 100 The Encounter 101 The Call 104 The Response 105 Distance and Separation 107 The Hermeneutical Nature of the Flesh 110 Flesh as a Hermeneutical Phenomenon 111 Imagining as an Embodied Phenomenon 112 Flesh, Imagination, and the Hermeneutical Response 117 The Amorous Imagination as the Site of the Endless Hermeneutic 118 Chapter 5 Toward a Phenomenology of the Amorous Imagination 126 A Preliminary Note on Time and Culture 126 Amorous Illumination 128 Amorous Intention 131 Amorous Imaginings 135 Romantic Envisioning 135 Reading across Distance 137 Belief, Presence, and Absence 138 Impossibility and Insufficiency 141 Castle‐Building 143 Hidden Away 145 Fidelity, Assurance, and Meaning 146 Haunted by Death 148 Amorous Individuation 149 Chapter 6 The Dark Side of Love 152 The Dangers of the Amorous Imagination 152 Solipsism 153 Delusion and Misapprehension 155 Idolatry and Narcissism 158 Violence 159 Death 161 The Dissolution and Disillusion of Love 163 Conclusion: Love’s Univocity and What’s Left Unsaid 166 Love’s Univocity? 166 Synopsis 169 The Hermeneutic Continues 172 Notes 176 Bibliography 194 Index 202 Building on Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of love this book takes up the "question of the Other" and argues that through the interpretive activities of the amorous imagination lovers come to experience one another as the Beloved.