Aimer et le dire

Abstract

How to speak about love even today? How to tell this experience in first person that nobody can avoid? If literature and poetry clearly describe better the meanders and the richness of the feelings of love than philosophy, the latter can clarify what such a broad notion covers. However, it must avoid two pitfalls, technicality and cynicism, which risk destroying its object, and make itself available to the elucidation of the forms of love in a reflective approach. It appears then that the oscillation between typology and definition of love remains undecidable since Plato. The abundant philosophy of love of the last 20 years confirms indeed that three different movements are irreducible and that the ways of expressing them are also distinct. Thus Eros is accompanied by the declaration, while friendship is confided and Agape necessarily falls into the traps of its expression.