The Phenomenology of Love and Reading

by Cassandra Falke

The current revival of interest in ethics in literary criticism coincides fortuitously with a revival of interest in love in philosophy. The literary return to ethics also coincides with a spate of neuroscientific discoveries about cognition and emotion. But without a philosophical grounding this new work cannot speak convincingly about literature's relationship to our ethical lives. Jean-Luc Marion's articulation of a phenomenology of love provides this philosophical grounding.

The Phenomenology of Love and Reading accepts Jean-Luc Marion's argument that love matters for who we are more than anything—more than cognition and more than being itself. Cassandra Falke shows how reading can strengthen our capacity to love by giving us practice in love´s habits—attention, empathy, and a willingness to be overwhelmed. Confounding our expectations, literature equips us for the confounding events of love, which, Falke suggests, are not rare and fleeting, but rather constitute the most meaningful and durable part of our everyday life.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory

186 pages, Hardcover

Published November 17, 2016

Reviews

[Jeremy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I started reading while in Chattanooga for a Conference on Christianity and Literature (early April 2017). Started back into it in late November 2017. Stopped because I found someone else to co-review the book with me. Any perceived deficiencies are probably due to my non-philosophical mind.

Introduction
1: Jean-Luc Marion (JLM): "love" is "the force through which we are made and remade"; "the erotic reduction" = "the view that we become ourselves through our loves and hates"; this book "examines the implications of the erotic reduction for literary theory"
1–2: "erotic reduction" is superior to both "the epistemic reduction" (reading to acquire knowledge) and "the ontological reduction" (reading changes who we are as individuals) because it "prop[els us] from the world of a book into the world of others"
2: "The act of reading does not guarantee a future ethical action. No act in the present does." —> "to whatever extent reading includes actions that are part of love, to that extent it changes us"
3: reading is an act that "holds" (as well as more "practical" activities, such as feeding the hungry; "Reading creates in us new ways of loving, and thus new ways of being. Or it can. In order for a book to work on us this way, we have to open ourselves up . . ."
3–4: very brief summaries of Chs. 1–6; Chs. 4–6 are on "habits of love in which reading trains us"
4: Falke's argument is basically that "reading can make us better lovers"
4–6: two objections: 1) normativity vs. moral relativism, and 2) the lack of completion/fulfillment through books
5: "if we accept that the basis of all our lives is love and begin within the erotic reduction seeking ways to have more of the life that love offers us, then literature operates with an ethical force upon the selves that we are continually becoming" [big "if"]
Introducing Marion
6–8: JLM's work is well-known among philosophers, but not as well-known among literature folks (although other phenomenological folks get recognition, such as Derrida, Lévinas, and Ricoeur); some of this is due to the fact that it takes time for a younger generation of thinkers to be recognized, but another reason might be due to a "theological turn" within phenomenology (connection to post-secularism)
9: "the basis from which all our doing arises, which is love"
9–10: "An approach to literature informed by Marion's phenomenology must begin with a focus on givenness"—two implications: 1) charitable reading (a text is a gift; philosophy and theology; Alan Jacobs) and 2) recognizing the otherness of a text (like a welcoming host); [cf. the "spontaneous" theory of poetry]
The problem of rhetoric
10: wants to avoid sentimentality
11: "The Phenomenology of Love and Reading proclaims the insufficiency of reason and challenges the presumption that unveiling error is the highest goal of writing about literature."; "the epistemological focus of 'unveiling error' must be replaced by a focus on the practices that a reader and a text can perform together"
12: Charles Taylor; Luke Ferretter
13: Gadamer (not a Christian)
14: "Criticism should itself be an act of love"
14–15: "I think this book's most significant contribution will be to welcome Marion's work more fully into this conversation."

Ch. 1: Phenomenology and Literature
19: nice turn of phrase
19–20: intent of Ch. 1
21: jumps from Aristotle to 18c

Ch. 2: The Erotic Reduction

Ch. 3: The Lover's Advance

Interlude

Ch. 4: Empathy

Ch. 5: Attention

Ch. 6: Being Overwhelmed

Conclusion

[Catherine Meijer · Rating 4 out of 5]

'In Jean-Luc Marion's thinking, we are a bedazzled people. The unfurling of events, the encounter with art, the experience of flesh itself, and the meeting of another's gaze reveal our good fortune to be the recipients of innumerable gifts--more than we could have imagined, more than we can take in, a number dumfounding the question of use. For the last twenty years, Marion has characterized our days and nights as a series of "saturated phenomena" where the event, artwork, flesh of face that gives itself to us overhwelms our capacity to experience it and in the process reconstitutes our capacities to expect, receive, and express more givenness. In the last ten years he has named the force through which we are made and remade "love."'

An excellent introduction to a fascinating phenomenological approach to reading literature. Several points would have been quite helpful to an essay on visual art I was writing last term, but alas! Will certainly require a re-read since I'm a newbie to phenomenology, but what I did understand was insightful.