Documentary about Suzanne Lilar, pt. 7

http://www.lamediatheque.be/the/auteurs_belges/auteurs/lilar_suzanne_.html .
This video clip shows a segment of the 1979 documentary film about the Belgian writer Suzanne Lilar (1901-1992) entitled "Suzanne Lilar - Au-delà de l'apparence".

(Sorry for the bad image quality of some passages)

This segment is entitled "L'amour déraisonnable" -- "Unreasonable love"

In "Le Couple (1963), translated as "Aspects of Love in Western Society" (1965), Suzanne Lilar establishes an opposition between reasonable love - which is profane- and unreasonable love (or "l'amour fou") - which is sacred. She pleads for a resacralization of love as the fundamental basis for the couple. Unreasonable love, founded on desire, is sacral because it proposes to go beyond the creature. It already represents a fundamental nostalgia for a sort of lost paradise, of an indistinctness from which we came from, of which we have a vague memory, and to which we desire, we burn, to return.

This love is sacral (it communicates the sacred) and cathartic in that it reduces love to its essence - not unlike Plato's critical purification at the level of the mind (and to which Diotima will try to initiate Socrates in the Symposium), or the purifying quest for the divine by the 13th century poet and mystic Hadewijch of Antwerp (see also Part 9).

Lilar evokes the violence of the love between Héloïse and Abélard (see also Part 6).

Lilar pleads for a feminism that takes into account female attributes that are virile, masculine. On the other end, as the current world - the world of Hiroshima and of the concentration camps, rewards too much the masculine values of aggressiveness and competitiveness, she posits it would be desirable for all of humankind to incorporate in life the feminine values of opening, reception and receptivity as well.

The film by Jean-Marie Mersch & Joseph Benedek was produced for the Belgian TV station, R.T.B.F.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_Lilar

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