The Amorous Imagination

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. 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.