Marcus Steinweg, on The Aporias of Love

Marcus Steinweg, in his book Aporien der Liebe (Aporias of Love, 2010), says that the aporias of love are conditions of its possibility, insofar as love means resistance to narcissistic self-mirroring and openness to otherness. Love is aporetic, because it is both singular and universal, and because it exposes the lovers to the conflict not only between singularity and universality, but also between uniqueness and structuring convention.
      According to Steinweg, there are at least five aporias (insoluble problems) belonging to the experience of love: (1) the aporia of emptiness, (2) the aporia of happiness, (3) the aporia of hyperbolism, (4) the aporia of intensity, and (5) the aporia of the impossible.
      The aporia of emptiness is that the lover feels an emptiness in the absence of the beloved, and yet this absence is also the ground of possibility for another encounter between the lover and the beloved.
      The aporia of happiness is that, as difficult as it is not to expect happiness from love, those who free themselves from this expectation may also be those most likely to be happy.
      The aporia of hyperbolism is that love may become a kind of fever that drives us to reach beyond ourselves, opening us to the presence of the Other. Rather than promoting greater stability, love may take us through peaks and valleys of experience.
      The aporia of intensity is that love may be an experience of something that eludes us and is beyond us and yet is capable of being experienced.
      The aporia of the impossible is that for love, the possible and the impossible (like reality and ideality) are pseudo-alternatives, because every love creates its own aporias. Love is situated in the aporetic compossibility of finitude and infinity, and the aporia is also revealed by the unity in which the finite singularity of lovers encounters the infinite universality of love.¹ 
      Still another aporia is that of the "who" and the "what" of love. Do we love someone because of who they are as a whole person or because of the particular qualities (such as attractiveness and intelligence) that they possess? The blindness of love may consist in our being willing to lose sight of the "what" in order to affirm the "who."² 
      Still another aporia is that to affirm the Other as constitutive of oneself is also to affirm the incompleteness of oneself without the Other, and the incommensurability of oneself with the Other as Other.
      Other aporias of love include those of reason and unreason, presence and absence, and immanence and transcendence.

FOOTNOTES

¹Marcus, Steinweg, Aporien der Liebe (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2010), p. 15.

²Ibid., p. 38.

Exam Question in Sentential Logic

This semester, I'm taking a class in deductive logic at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Below is my answer to a question on our second exam (construct a derivation of the conclusion in line 2 from the premise in line 1). The exam covered derivations in sentential logic, based on Gary M. Hardegree's Symbolic Logic: A First Course, second edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999). The annotation to the right of each line shows the justification for its presence in the derivation, with "Pr" standing for premise, "CD" standing for conditional derivation, "As" standing for assumption, "ID" standing for indirect derivation, "DD" standing for direct derivation, and "X" standing for contradiction.

Below is my answer to another question.

Brandon Terry presents "Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement"

Philosopher Brandon Terry, talking about his new book, "Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement," at Red Emma's bookstore, in Baltimore.

Meeting Brandon Terry.

Brandon Terry is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and Codirector of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. His new book is a ground-breaking work of scholarship exploring the varying interpretations of the civil rights movement that are found in contemporary politics and offering a new vision of what the civil rights movement has been and what it can still be.