Abstract

Adopting the analytic resources of the post-modern criticism of the Hegelian theory of recognition, medieval Arab courtly love reveals a modernity - often unnoticed - in the way the topic of love is treated by its theoreticians as a human experience of conflict between desire and Law. Actually, behind the aesthetic of !arf , love theory seems to conceal a powerful and dramatic will to impose an ethics to itself. On the one hand, martyrdom for love is the extreme outcome of a care for oneself which aims at a form of spirituality; on the other hand, ethics of courtly love expresses the vindication of a legitimate and lawful belonging to the realm of the human that is denied by the normativity of law. From this point of contact and conflict between nature and culture, between desire and social order, a particular discourse about suffering of love seems to come to light; in submitting its legitimacy and its lawfulness to a hermeneutic of the law, that discourse is able to provide a meaning and a form of recognition.