Member-only story
Dear AE,
I received your drawing.
Let’s begin/let me respond with Levinas:
“A little kindness going only from man to man, not crossing distances to get to the places where events and forces unfold! A remarkable utopia of the good or the secret of its beyond.”
Last night at Reggio you talked a lot about you kindness and distance… and Levinas — so I was not surprised to find a passage of Levinas that accorded with what you were saying…
What are we trying to get at? What were we trying to get it? What is Levinas?
These metaphysical “utopias” — that arise between what you called “the lyrical subject.”
I said last night that I stopped understanding what the concept of a lyrical subject is, and I still mean that — the term is just a tad (covertly, stealthily) romantic for me. But I do understand what you’re trying to get at: this intersubjective magic… this sense of the Good that springs up spontaneously in moments of silence, at the end of an ellipses…
(It seems my own terminology is more romantic than yours — maybe that was my complaint: not romantic enough).
N
