The Amorous Imagination

Individuating the Other-as-Beloved

By D. Andrew Yost

Subjects: Philosophy, Religion, Romanticism
Series: SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought
Hardcover : 9781438484730, 209 pages, August 2021
Paperback : 9781438484747, 209 pages, January 2022

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Love, the Imagination, and the Other

1. The Philosophy of Love: A New Opening

2. The Lovers Emerge: Marion, Saturation, and Individuation

3. From The Other to This Other: Individuation and Imagination

4. The Amorous Event and the Endless Hermeneutic

5. Toward a Phenomenology of the Amorous Imagination

6. The Dark Side of Love

Conclusion: Love's Univocity and What's Left Unsaid

Notes
Bibliography
Index

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.

Description

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.

D. Andrew Yost is an attorney and Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver.