The Architecture of Impossible Intimacy
The Violence of Clarity
Last month, I sat across from someone I've known for twenty years and realized we'd become strangers through too much understanding. Every gesture catalogued, every silence interpreted, every expression decoded until nothing remained but the autopsy of a relationship.
This is what Levinas meant when he wrote about the face of the other as that which "resists possession." We've turned love into forensics, intimacy into data analysis. The dating apps promise compatibility through algorithms, measuring understanding like a commodity.
But what if it's something else that's going on?