Funny feelings: taking love to the cinema with Woody Allen

This dissertation utilizes the films of Woody Allen in order to position the cinema as a site where realizing and practicing an embodied experience of love is possible. This dissertation challenges pessimistic readings of Woody Allen’s film that render love difficult, if not impossible. By challenging assumptions about love, this dissertation opens a dialogue not only about the representation of love, but the understanding of love. Rather than a Platonic love of unity, this dissertation combines the phenomenological work of Luce Irigaray and Jean-Luc Marion to describe a love of letting be. A love of letting be focuses on the lived experience of love as a phenomenology. In a love of letting be it is the intent of both lovers to regard each other as an unknowable whole, whom they must support and whose mystery they must protect. The transformations of four characters from Allen’s cinema, Allan Felix of Play it Again, Sam, Alvy Singer of Annie Hall, Cecilia of The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Mickey Sachs of Hannah and her Sisters serve as illustrations of how coming to a love of letting be is possible. The four characters, the nervous romantics, come to understand a love of letting be through their experience in the cinema. Their experience in the cinema comes to enlighten their understanding and living of love as a love of letting be.

Funny feelings: taking love to the cinema with Woody Allen

This dissertation utilizes the films of Woody Allen in order to position the cinema as a site where realizing and practicing an embodied experience of love is possible. This dissertation challenges pessimistic readings of Woody Allen’s film that render love difficult, if not impossible. By challenging assumptions about love, this dissertation opens a dialogue not only about the representation of love, but the understanding of love. Rather than a Platonic love of unity, this dissertation combines the phenomenological work of Luce Irigaray and Jean-Luc Marion to describe a love of letting be. A love of letting be focuses on the lived experience of love as a phenomenology. In a love of letting be it is the intent of both lovers to regard each other as an unknowable whole, whom they must support and whose mystery they must protect. The transformations of four characters from Allen’s cinema, Allan Felix of Play it Again, Sam, Alvy Singer of Annie Hall, Cecilia of The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Mickey Sachs of Hannah and her Sisters serve as illustrations of how coming to a love of letting be is possible. The four characters, the nervous romantics, come to understand a love of letting be through their experience in the cinema. Their experience in the cinema comes to enlighten their understanding and living of love as a love of letting be.

“The Blue Rose” by Lesia Ukrainka as the ‘rite de passage’: biography, psychiatry and writing

The paper explores “The Blue Rose” (1896) by Lesia Ukrainka in terms of the ‘rite de passage’ as the text with a ritual function that reflects the cultural, gender, and author status transformations within the field of literature. In the most general sense, the first drama by Lesia Ukrainka is analyzed as an act of initiation into the fin de siècle culture. Peculiar features of this ritual are the critical comments of the modern culture, transformation of the autobiographical facts into aesthetic phenomena, and interiorization of the motif of death. “The Blue Rose” discusses a female genetic illness — a popular topic of the late 19th century — and depicts an attempt of escaping into the illusionary world of platonic love. Representation of the female insanity and ‘unconventional love’, as well as the critique of a bourgeois view of happiness and the patriarchal world, is also an important aspect of the drama. References to the unpublished materials of Lesia Ukrainka’s archive — her excerpts from the “Psychiatry” by Krafft-Ebing — allow concluding that “The Blue Rose” treats insanity as a psychiatric and not a psychological phenomenon. The mother-daughter relations as well as the tension of the mother-son relations in the family of Kosaches are also an important element in Lesia Ukrainka’s work. “The Blue Rose” (1896) is a multidimensional and experimental drama. Its author transforms numerous autobiographical facts into cultural situations and engages in a discussion on the topical themes and motifs of the fin de siècle, in particular female insanity, hysteria, and maternity. The writer employs naturalistic methods of analysis and reinforces descriptions of female insanity with the facts from psychiatric practice. “The Blue Rose” displays an interest of Lesia Ukrainka in Neoplatonism, which she would later associate with a Neo-romantic impulse ‘ins Blaue’. In general, the author did not follow the foreign patterns, as the critiques noted, but explored the Zeitgeist of the new era. She involved authentic practical experience of her own life and the lives of her relatives and friends, analyzed moral norms and psychological states referring to the cultural codes that ranged from “The Romance of the Rose”, Dante, Shakespeare, and Heine to Zola, Ibsen, and Nadson. This practice ensured Lesia Ukrainka’s initiation into the fin de siècle culture and paved her way to the modernist drama.

A Neo-Platonic Dialogue on the Ethics of Love*

In his classic paper on “The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato” Gregory Vlastos denied that according to Plato’s Diotima in the Symposium a human individual can ever be the proper object of one’s erotic desire, because what one (should) be enamoured with is the Form of Beauty. For the true Platonic lover, the beauty of an individual is only the starting-point for one to understand that beauty can reside also in more abstract levels. Hence, Vlastos argues that the beloved individual is for his lover only a means to an end, so that the lover recollects and attains to true Beauty, and that this is morally objectionable. The systematic Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus (412–485 AD) had already given an answer to this accusation. I will first present the altruistic side of Eros as an ontological entity in Proclus’s metaphysical system. My guide in this will be Socrates, as well as the Platonic Demiurge from the Timaeus and Republic’s philosopher-king. It will be shown that, according to Proclus’s interpretation of various Platonic texts, Vlastos was wrong to accuse Plato of the abovementioned “instrumentality” on the erotic field. However, my paper will close with a critical engagement with Proclus too, since I discern that in his view of Platonic love another sort of instrumentality, one which is akin to Stoic ethics, arises. Vlastos was wrong, but we do not need to be wholeheartedly sympathetic to Proclus.

Platonic Communion and ‘An Unfinished Romance’ in Gaston de Latour

This chapter explores the Platonism in Pater’s Gaston de Latour, which began publication in monthly instalments in 1888. Like Marius, Gaston is set in a time of religious turmoil—the religious wars of sixteenth-century France—and follows a single character in search of spiritual transcendence. Along the way Gaston has critical encounters with historical authors, such as Michel de Montaigne and Giordano Bruno, who enrich his understanding of Platonism. The love that seeks wholeness in Plato’s Symposium is proposed as a model for Pater’s critical engendering with historical authors. Beyond Platonic love narratives, Pater incorporates the Odyssean homecoming, employed by Neoplatonists, and the Christian narrative of desire in Song of Solomon. Gaston’s later chapters seem to engage with Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ concerning what Pater means by the phrase ‘lover and philosopher at once’, inspired by Plato’s Phaedrus.

The Revelation of Plato and Platonism and the Authority of Affinity

This chapter traces the momentum of Platonic themes in essays leading up to Plato and Platonism (1893) and explores the book as a revelation of Pater’s lifelong philosophy informing his work. The structure of the book is explained as representative of Oxonian Platonism without losing sight of what makes it so characteristic of Pater. The central themes of Pater’s writing are elucidated through his understanding of Platonism, particularly through The Republic. Concerned with Plato as an author, Pater explains how he seeks organization in things, States as well as persons as well as artwork, for the sake of sanity, a conservative commitment that fights against decadence. The maintenance of sanity, the reason in beauty, is sought for the sake of one’s soul in Platonic education. It is Platonic love, explained as the affinity for persons like-to-like, that enables one to attain knowledge and express oneself with authority.