Huaiyuan Zhang

Emmanuel Levinas situates transcendence in the encounter with the Other, yet the role of eros within this ethical framework remains contested. This article argues that Levinas’s account of eros in Totality and Infinity introduces a constitutive ambiguity—between proximity and distance, enjoyment and withdrawal— through which alterity appears within intimacy. Far from a pre‑ethical detour, eros generates an erosive temporality marked by delay and futurity. Through the figures of caress and fecundity, eros opens time beyond the present and renders intelligible the ethical diachrony later elaborated in Otherwise than Being. Read as a temporal apprenticeship to responsibility rather than as something to be surpassed, eros makes ethical transcendence phenomenologically intelligible within lived experience, where desire unsettles self‑sufficiency and exposes the subject to the Other’s future.

This article reinterprets Levinas’s account of ethical subjectivity by centering the temporality of the pas encore (“not yet”) and drawing on new materials in Œuvres complètes. I argue that, in Totality and Infinity, eros and ethics are internally continuous: eros generates a responsible not yet of time, secured by fecundity and oriented to the Third. Unpublished notebooks and drafts show Levinas grounding subjectivity in the hopeful openness of the present and discerning in erotic life a hidden orientation toward the future—the not-yet that gives a yet-to-come, a surplus that becomes responsibility. On this basis, time appears not primarily as projection toward a distant horizon but as an ethical delay within the present, a not yet that resists closure. The dossier of Totality and Infinity clarifies the links among enjoyment, Desire, fecundity, and mortality, and explains why the phrase from Entre Nous—“the future of death in the present of love”—becomes legible only in light of this background. The result is a distinct account of erotic temporality: love’s time is a responsible not yet that opens the present for the Other and, through fecundity, widens into the time of the Third.

This paper engages Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis to rethink the ethics of eros in Plato’s Symposium through the interplay of need, desire, and love. Levinas envisions love as desire beyond-in-need—an ethical openness to the Other—that intersects with Diotima’s ascent to the Form of beauty and Aristophanes’ vision of incomplete halves seeking wholeness. Lacan, by contrast, figures love as a misaligned encounter between lacks, illuminating the tragicomic failure of reciprocity between Alcibiades and Socrates. These readings reveal the Symposium’s unresolved dialectic of desire and underscore the enduring vitality of Platonic eros in modern thought.

This article presents a fresh reconstruction of Emmanuel Levinas’ constellation of references to Plato (Platonica) in Totality and Infinity, with particular attention to Levinas’ transformation of the Platonic desire for the Good into the ethical significance of eros. Although Levinas critiques a Platonic metaphysics of presence, he reactivates Platonic motifs—especially the Good beyond being and the erotic structure of transcendence—in service of a phenomenology of ethical responsibility. Drawing on Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic, and Apology, the study shows how Levinas reorients eros from a teleological ascent toward the intelligible into an asymmetrical opening to the Other. The Good, no longer a sovereign Idea, becomes an imperative trace that commands without appearing, while eros, reimagined through desire and fecundity, reveals the contours of ethical transcendence through bodily vulnerability. Levinas’ anachronistic but creative retrieval of Platonic symbols is not a repetition of doctrinaire Platonism, but what he calls a return “in a new way”—one that relocates transcendence from the heights of metaphysical vision to the immediacy of the imploring face. By situating Levinas’ ethics within and against the Platonic tradition, the article reframes the ethical relation as a speech-initiated rupture rather than a harmonious ascent, offering a distinctive alternative to classical accounts of justice, knowledge, and love—and a new frame for reading Plato through an ethics of alterity and eros.

Since Narcissus sees himself seeing himself, i.e., comes to self‑ consciousness and plunges into self‑destruction under the gaze, thinkers have problematized the Delphic maxim of “knowing thyself” from a visual perspective. In this trend, psychoanalysis joins the self‑criticism of phenomenology in subverting the “myth” of the self‑reflective consciousness. Whereas Lacan relegates the mirror stage to the Imaginary and interprets the gaze as objet a to account for the split in the subject, Merleau‑Ponty overcomes the narcissistic enclosure of the tacit cogito by appealing to the self’s abandonment to the gaze of the other in an open‑circuit of the reversible flesh. Through the lens of the topological concept of parallax, this study illuminates the fundamental distinctions between these two perspectives and proposes a promising future of psychoanalytic phenomenology.

Plato's view on time, a key aspect of his doctrine of forms, is influenced by his reception of Parmenides, but the way in which Plato takes up and modifies Parmenides' view is a matter of ongoing scholarly debate. In this article, the author analyzes Plato's revision of Parmenidean time by exploring four temporalities: the eternal present, timeless eternity, the enduring present, and the instant between time and eternity. Through this examination, she uncovers the common origin of both the eternal present of Parmenides' fragment B8 and the flowing present of the phenomenal realm in the instant (ἐξαίφνης) in Plato's Parmenides. This perspective on time offers a promising solution to Plato's problem of participation, bridging the gap between the eternal being of the form and the being in time of the particulars.

Has philosophy ever completed a transition from divine revelation to rational reflection? Has it been Plato’s goal? In this paper I will establish and examine a parallel between divination and philosophy embodied in Plato’s Socrates. I will cite instances from both directions to analyze Plato’s indecision concerning a philosophical treatment of divination: On the one hand, Plato renovates the cultural stock of divination to supplement the rational process of Socratic dialectics. In particular, when he makes a proposal not as a proven proposition, but as the starting point of discussion, Socrates frequently helps himself to divinatory language. On the other hand, Plato does not seem to abandon the nondiscursive elements in his narrative, especially since the vision of the ultimate objective of the Platonic-Socratic project, i.e. the Good, requires a resort to divination. The indecision is reflected in the textual ambivalence as to whether the being of the Good transcends other forms or is on a par with other forms as the noblest form. Based on the correlation between the power of knowledge and the object of knowledge, I will argue that the epistemic entanglement of divination with reason in Plato’s approach corresponds to the ambiguous relationship between being and the Good in Plato’s ethically imbued metaphysical scheme. Since Plato presents Socrates as a seer in the aforementioned occasions, I will further suggest that Plato presents himself as a collector of oracles by preserving Socratic’s teaching in writing, whose ultimate meanings are open to interpretation and debate.