The Cup, The Jug, and the Other

I argue that the paranoic-critical analysis that Salvador Dalí does of the The Angelus painting in his The Tragic Myth of Millet's Angelus emphasizes the figure of the omnipotent mother. This shows us a specific kind of ontological regime in which one would be totally subject to the other. This is particularly obvious in the way Dalí relates the painting to a coffee set leading to an experience of ontological instability producing generalized anxiety and terror. By looking at Heidegger's analysis of a jug and looking at Levinas's comments on freedom and the constitution of the subject, two alternatives to Dalí's picture are found. Whereas Dalí gave a picture of total instability, Heidegger will give one of total rigidity leading to a compromise in Levinas of a situation in which I am both capable of a certain level of self-constitution while also having to be in relation with the other