Eros against Law: Levinas and Erotic Interiority in Don Juan of Kolomea

Critiquing Levinas’s serenely ethical conception of Eros, this essay challenges the Levinasian notion that the Erotic maintains an ethical framework, resulting in the inevitable return to the ethical through fecundity. Assuming the Legalistic Masochean turn within Levinas, as established by Kantor’s works, this article offers a literary analysis of Masoch’s Don Juan of Kolomea. Incorporating this emotive literary text as an interlocutor with whom Levinas’s conception of Eros can both be critiqued and corporealized, compelling new insights can be gleaned which invite discussion and commentary on both Levinas’s powerful if naively placid conception of Eros and more broadly upon the incumbent desire within modern discourse to conceive of only that Eros which is ethical. Within the pages of Masoch, Levinas’s Eros is conceived as that which refutes the ethical compulsion of the Other as Law. It is an Eros beyond ethics, against Law and tragically beyond the beleaguered beloved.