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ABSTRACT
Freud’s understanding of science allowed no origin for commitment to ethical values except via the superego. Recently, some psychoanalysts have found a more persuasive source in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. In this paper, using in particular Viviane Chetrit-Vatine’s notion of “matricial space,” I attempt to look further at the implications of Levinas’s idea of “transcendence,” not as something special but as the ordinary horizon of seriously-held ethical values. To work as such, it must involve an affective dimension. Referencing Derrida’s Adieu for Levinas, I discuss this in terms of different meanings of the word “love,” in particular a certain sort of love for the unique “being” of the other, rather than for his or her “doing.”
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David M. Black
David M. Black, M.A., F.Inst.Psychoanal, is a poet and a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society. He edited Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st Century (Routledge New Library of Psychoanalysis, 2006) and authored Why Things Matter: The Place of Values in Science, Psychoanalysis and Religion (Routledge, 2011). His translation and commentary on Dante’s Purgatorio (NYRB Classics) appeared in 2021.