It's the worst thing you can do for your love life (aside from drink-and-dial).
Now I know that what I desire is wrong. It's all so clear now. Women are not just disposable parts of the male sexual economy. Eroticisms of voluptuosity are inauthentic face-to-face [doggie is a verboten because it is so animalistic] relationships that tarnish the purity of erotic love. (B.C. Hutchence, Levinas: A Guide for the Perplexed)
But I'm not content with such an insight. I want to go deeper. I want to get into French-Belgium feminist Luce Irgaray who opposes the view that the female is "brought into a world not her own so that the male lover may enjoy himself and gain strength for his voyage toward an autistic transcendence."
I completely followed that sentence until running smack into the word "autistic." I thought that meant retarded and I don't know what retarded transcendence means unless it is hot sex with someone whose IQ is below 80.
Irigaray argues that Levinas "knows nothing of communion in pleasure" where there's "immediate ecstasy" between lovers.
Me neither, Emmanuel.
Emmanuel Levinas -- does he allow for the erotic?
According to Irigaray: "Although [Levinas] takes pleasure in caressing, he abandons the feminine other, leaves her to sink, in particular into the darkness of a psuedoanimality, in order to return to his responsibility in a world of men-amonst-themselves."
Levinas argues that there are two types of erotic relationships. There's the atheistic kind where the partners mutually satisfy their selfish desires. Such eroticism is merely the play of self-interested carnality, and we wouldn't want that.
Female erotic nudity is but an "inverted signification," a "clarity converted into ardor and night." Wouldn't want that either.
The women reveals her nudity to hide her feminity.
"One plays with the Other as with a young animal."
Because I can't figure out the meaning other type of erotic relationship according to Levinas, I'll probably never taste it.
From now on, when I study philosophers on love, I'm sticking to Air Supply.
ChaimAmalek: I saw the Museum of Natural History's new Darwin exhibit (you don't get things like that in LA, do you?). Did you know he married his first cousin and had ten kids with her?
ChaimAmalek: So first cousins f---ing can work out.
Luke: Yes, there's a famous book about it
ChaimAmalek: The torah?
Luke: The Moral Animal by Robert Wright
ChaimAmalek: Ah, I have it somewhere.
ChaimAmalek: Arabs love to do that.
ChaimAmalek: And have tons of kids. Maybe a certain degree of consanguinity and fecundity are linked.
Luke: I fear that Emmanuel Levinas does not make room for the erotic
ChaimAmalek: Levinas sounds like another in that regretably long line of Jews whom over-educated goyim fall for hook, line, and sinker. Marx and Freud being two of the more recent ones. Along with all those Hollywood Juden.
ChaimAmalek: I read that Elizabeth Hayt's introductory sex column in the Post yesterday.
ChaimAmalek: Yet ANOTHER such column by a woman. elizabeth.hayt@nypost.com She waited too long..... You should write her, seduce her via email, then share her emails with us when it is over. She does not look at all hot.
Luke: what does "autistic transcendence" mean?
ChaimAmalek: It means the author likely is a feminist.
ChaimAmalek: It's like "fecal luminescence" or "paranoid sexual prototensor." It's bad; it means the author is a crazy feminist who likely owns cats.
ChaimAmalek: you date her next?
ChaimAmalek: It won't work.
ChaimAmalek: You just can't feign respect for it
ChaimAmalek: This s--- is painful to read.
ChaimAmalek: This is what happens to women who neglect to f---, get pregnant, bear the kid live, and raise him.
ChaimAmalek: Abortion, cats, feminism, madness.
ChaimAmalek: The one good thing I have to say about this sort of feminism is that if it did not exist, these people would be blowing themselves up in public places.
Their motto is: "Where "two" is greater than "three"!"
As Dennis Prager notes, depth is inversely proportionate to the number of people in the conversation.
Who wrote this crap introducing the Levinas Society?
This is pretentious: "working toward effecting the ethical..."
"As new generations of young scholars continue..." If they are new generations, then they will be young. "Continue" is a lame verb.
This whole sentence sucks: "As new generations of young scholars continue to comment on Levinas' insights and develop the work of his translators and exegetes, the need for a broad society aimed at coordinating the important work occurring throughout the Americas is clearly evident."
"prolific interest..." Prolific is not the right word to modify interest.
"The multiple purposes..." Of course "purposes" are multiple...
"(1) to assemble an organizational structure for the purposes of coordinating society activities;" Such crap writing.
"face to face with one another..." Of course it will be "with one another" in that context. Superflous.
"mutually edifying and social atmosphere..." Sounds like a circle jerk.
Here's Levinas the Talmudic scholar.
Chaim Amalek writes: "I think the Levinas Society is a joke. The announcement reads like a parody of academic gobbledygook. You should cut and paste it, use it for something."
If the Levinas Society website is not a joke, but rather a message shaped for its audience, what does that tell you about the audience?
The Levitras Society for the Analytical Deconstruction of Penile Dysfunction
Based on the pioneering work of Frankfort School Dielectician Yonah Shimmel.
Scholars across the disciplines are pleased to announce the formation of The Levitras Society. Inspired by Lithuanian-born philosopher and Talmudic commentator Yonah Shimmel (1906-1995) and contemporary Levitras scholarship, we propose developing a formal society to coordinate and enhance critical work and collaboration across the pornographic disciplines. The goal of this society is to facilitate a broad and dynamic community of persons working toward effecting the ethical in political, feminist, religious, critical, literary, pedagogical and philosophical realms.
An Orthodox friend writes me June 11, 2006:
You ought to remove the Emmanuel Levinas page which sounds like you haven't actually read him, only intros, and nonsense by this Chaim Amalek. Levinas was one of the most beautiful Jewish thinkers of the past century, and certainly, given your particular set of concerns, recognizing a Judaism centered upon concern for the Other should be more sympathetically viewed. And that comment about his Talmudic discourses is way off base, it is a fabulous collection and I even specifically made a trek in Paris to the Jewish bookstores to get the ones not translated into English. [Read this essay about Levinas's] attack on Kierkegaard. He was actually quite a scholar, ran the Jewish school, and learned regularly with many distinguished French Rabbis, both Ashkenazic and Sepharadic.