Ethics, Self and the Other: A Levinasian Reading of the Postmodern Novel

By Canan Savkay

Examining the impact of poststructuralist theories on the writings of four of the most eminent contemporary novelists, this book argues that the postmodern approach to language has given rise to fiction's ongoing exploration of ethics and the relation to the Other. In a globalised world that is marked by cruelty and intolerance, the contemporary novel appears to be preoccupied with ways to explore the reasons for violence and to find alternative ways for reconciliation.

This book undertakes an in-depth study of the fiction of four leading contemporary novelists and draws attention to the ideas they share with the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Although Levinas's concept of ethics is mainly based on the responsibility to the other person and therefore appears to be confined to an interpersonal level, it should be noted that Levinas's philosophy emerged from personal suffering during the Nazi regime. Having to witness the cruelty that man can inflict onto others, Levinas developed a philosophy that revolves around the responsibility of the self for the other person.

This book undertakes a close text analysis and reveals how the novels in discussion share with Levinas the view that political and social justice has to start with the personal relation to the other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Aug 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456789831

Canan Savkay

Having written various articles on poststructuralist theory and postmodern literature, Canan Savkay in this book explores the ethical aspect of the postmodern novel. An avid reader of postmodern fiction, Canan Savkay argues against the common belief that postmodern literature is irresponsible and emphasises how the poststructural concept of language invigorates the postmodern novel's preoccupation with ethics and the concept of the Other. After her graduation from Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg, Germany, Canan Savkay moved to Istanbul where she is currently employed as an Assistant Professor at Istanbul University.

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Contents

Introduction

Iris Murdoch’s Vision of Love in The Green Knight

Art, Politics and the Feminine in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty

Becoming Human: The Language of Love in Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods

Self and Other: The Saying and the Said in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Conclusion

Works Cited:

Introduction

Theories of the postmodern novel are inextricably linked with theories on both the decentred modern subject and the new scepticism in the belief in a final truth. Discussing the concerns of contemporary fiction, Terry Eagleton claims that No idea is more unpopular with contemporary cultural theory than that of absolute truth (103). While previous modes of art are characterised by their concentration on epistemological questions concerning the nature of knowledge and subjectivity (McHale 9), postmodernism rejects out of hand the possibility to objectively define reality.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud’s critique of the notion of man as a rational and self-conscious being transformed the modernist novel into an art form which displayed the difficulty to rationally comprehend the human psyche. Hence we find in modernist fiction an increased interest in the exploration of consciousness. Jacques Lacan took Freud’s concept of the subject one step further when he applied Freud’s theories on subject formation to the concept of language acquisition and thereby utterly transformed the critical approach towards literature. Linda Hutcheon comments on the new trend of critical theory to focus on the psychoanalytic de-centering of the subject and underscores a crucial aspect when she claims that To decenter is not to deny. (159) Like Hutcheon, many critics have been led to defend deconstruction and the decentring of the subject and endow it with an ‘ethical motivation’ (Hägglund 76), because deconstruction’s rejection of limits, determinate forms, or ultimate vocabularies (Patton 28) are different forms of resistance to repressive ideologies.

Derrida’s deconstructive approach, for instance, has revealed how Western thought relies on the erection of binary oppositions which privilege only one term in the system of hierarchical opposites. In the last few decades therefore techniques of deconstruction have been employed in order to criticise a form of discourse that has been traditionally marginalising various groups such as women, blacks or gay/lesbians and this has led to the fact that criticism of ideology has become one of the major features of postmodernism (Hutcheon 200). The target of this new form of criticism has been the ‘universal subject’ who has been for a long time considered as the bourgeois, white, individual, western ‘Man’ (Hutcheon 159), thereby turning all those who do not fit into this category by virtue of their sex, race or class into an inferior other. This is one reason why postmodern fiction can be viewed as a response (ironic, deconstructive) to the narrative forms and epistemology of an earlier, literary-cultural paradigm (Maltby 373), because the acknowledgement of the relation between discourse and ideology proposes alternative notions of subjectivity (Hutcheon 159). As a metanarrative, postmodern fiction draws attention to its own fictionality in order to underline the interrelation between power and discourse and the way subjectivity is formed through language.

Deconstruction and the use of intertextual techniques have been most popular in the fields of feminist and post-colonial criticism and also in the field of queer theory, because this kind of approach reveals how discourse has been traditionally employed to marginalise and silence these groups. However, parallel to this new form of criticism there has emerged a new focus on the other not as part of a group that has been marginalised, but as the Other as such. This is mainly the result of postmodernism’s distrust in absolute truth. As Dagmar Krause explains, postmodern ethics has to be seen as an attempt to deal with the fact that there are various systems of value, different norms for behaviour and no easy overriding principle of justification. Hence, the central idea of postmodern ethics… lies in the idea of negotiation (32). While deconstruction has been largely concerned with power and ideology, there has emerged a new trend in fiction that focuses on the relation to the other on an inter-personal and inter-subjective level, although it would be wrong to regard these novels as apolitical. Rather, these novels regard a personal sense of responsibility towards the other as a starting point from which to enter a wider realm that comprises both the political and the social order. Emmanuel Levinas, whose works represent an attempt to analyze the fundamental meaning of inter-subjectivity, interpreted as the self’s relation to… the ‘other’ (Blum 1983: 145), is one of the philosophers whose name comes up most often in recent critical writings on the nature of and the relation towards the other. Brian Harding notes that the question of the other has become, arguably, the preeminent question in philosophy today (406). Contrary to deconstuctionist literary criticism which is largely engaged with ideology’s formation of identity, Levinas regards the other as a challenge to the self. Although deconstruction and Levinas’s concept of ethics may at first glance appear to be divergent, Simon Critchley holds that there exist certain thematic and strategic similarities between Derrida’s and Levinas’s thinking which allow both deconstruction to be understood as an ethical demand and ethics to be approached deconstructively (Critchley 1999: 12). Derrida himself affirms this stance when he admits that despite all the apparent discrepancies there exists a close kinship between Levinas’s and his own approach. Derrida states that I often have difficulty in placing these discrepancies otherwise than as differences of ‘signature’, that is, of idiom, of ways of proceeding, of history, and of inscriptions connected to the biographical aspect, etc. These are not philosophical differences (Critchley 1999: 10). The close connection between deconstruction and Levinas’s project is further underscored by Derrida’s conviction of the ethical impact of his own approach, for Derrida claims that the function of deconstruction is to offer a place for the other, to let the other come. I am careful to say ‘let it come’ because if the other is precisely what is not invented, the initiative or deconstructive inventiveness can consist only in opening, . . . destabilizing foreclusionary structures so as to allow for the passage towards the other (Derrida 1992: 341).

One major point, however, in which deconstruction and Levinas’s philosophy differ, is Levinas’s concept of the self, for although both philosophers reject the concept of a self purely present to itself… Derrida, faithful to his project of deconstruction, moves on to a ‘selfless’ domain of language (Blum 1985: 306). To Levinas, however, the self finds itself obliged to an other, because the other bears the ‘trace’ of something more than simply the ‘not-self’ within the self (Blum 1985: 306). As Levinas points out, the other is the Stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself (2008: 39) and thus the other breaks up the enclosed self and commands him to responsibility. Jean Radford explains that For Levinas… identity—the self—is not a substance but a relation: what he calls the facet-to-face encounter with the other is not one in which a Hegelian pre-existing ego/self recognises the other in terms of identification or opposition, sameness or difference. It is the encounter with a radical ‘other’, before or beyond language, which calls the self into being (Radford 97). It is the trace of the other that confers significance to the self and the ensuing responsibility resulting from the encounter with the other has never been consciously assumed and it can never be discharged (Blum 1983: 147). According to Levinas, the ethical relationship is a moral summons (2008: 196) and reminds the self of the responsibility for the neighbour (Min 102). Explaining Levinas’s view of responsibility, Edith Wyschogrud states the other disrupts the web of conscious life as responsibility that cannot be justified… Levinas is not afraid to say that the Other ‘persecutes,’ not in the sense in which the other devises strategies antagonistic to one’s own interest, but because the moral life itself is persecution (Wyschogrod 166). The obligation to act responsibly is intricately connected with Levinas’s idea of the infinite and Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy where the idea of infinity refers neither to the limitlessness of a numerical series, nor to the unboundedness of spatial extension, but to an idea that exceeds the capacities of the subject that thinks it. The idea of infinity signifies the ‘absolutely other’ (MacDonald 190). It is the infinity perceived in the other that calls the self to responsibility and thus establishes the ethical encounter. Levinas writes The Infinite transcends itself in the finite, it passes the finite, in that it directs the neighbour to me without exposing itself to me (1997: 184). This other challenges the subject and places an absolute demand upon the self, a demand that transforms it essentially (Blum 1983: 164). The self, according to Levinas, finds itself challenged by the presence of the Other towards whom it is compelled to respond with responsibility and thus the Other is turned into the locus of identity" (Batnitzky 19). The other is able to challenge the self away from its self-enclosure, because the other bears the trace of infinity and thereby leads to transcendence.

Kenneth Reinhard notes that although both Lacan and Levinas worked on the subject of the formation of the self and its relation to the other around the same time in Paris, they never much commented on each other’s works (786). Indeed, Lacan’s theory on the formation of the self completely diverges from Levinas’s. There exists a wide gap between their methods, for whereas Lacan holds that identity can only be created through a relation to the other whereby the other is turned into a mirror which reflects to the subject an ideal image of itself (Lacan 6), in Levinas’s concept, the other is not turned into an object that has to reflect back an image the self demands. According to Levinas, the self is called upon from a height by the other and it is precisely the vulnerability of the other that calls for responsibility. Levinas states "human nakedness calls upon me—it calls upon the I that I am—it calls upon me from its weakness, without protection and without defense, from nakedness. But it also calls upon me from a strange authority—imperative, disarmed—the word of God and the verb in the human face" (1991: 198-199). It is thus the essential destitution of the other which makes ethics possible. To Lacan, on the other hand, even the most selfless-seeming Samaritan act contains elements of aggression, because Lacan regards even charitable work as an activity that is still inextricably tied to the subject’s constant attempt to renew and maintain a positive and fictional sense of self (Lacan 7).

Levinas’s idea of the self does not only mark itself off from psychoanalysis, but also from modern philosophy’s concept of the freedom of the individual. Claire Elise Katz contrasts Levinas’s approach with modern philosophy and states:

One of the most striking elements of Levinas’s ethical project is his overturning of the modern subject. Modern philosophy linked the subject’s responsibility to its freedom: one needs to be free in order to be held responsible. Levinas inverts this relationship in a manner that undercuts the free/not free distinction altogether. In Levinas’s account of responsibility, the subject’s obligation to the other is not chosen, nor can it be chosen. We cannot recuse ourselves from our obligation because it is not something that we chose in the first place. (100)

Faced with the horrors that man can do to others during the Nazi regime, Levinas has constructed a philosophy that confers prime importance to an other that reminds the self of its ethical obligation. Postmodern fiction reveals a similar concern, for the distrust in language as a means to reinforce ideological norms together with the deconstruction of the self have led to an increased interest in the formation of fictional characters whose ethical relation to the other is explored. This tendency reflects the growing hopelessness in the world’s state of affairs. Derrida states that never have violence, inequality, famine and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity (Derrida 1993: 85). Derrida’s description of the world’s present situation mirrors one of the prime concerns of postmodern fiction which is the search for ways to avoid global injustice and exploitation.

The engagement with the world’s problems and the search for solutions has become a major concern of postmodern fiction. The twentieth-century novel is marked by an increased engagement with the problem of subjectivity, yet whereas modernist fiction of the first half of the twentieth century is characterised by its attempt to invent ways of seeing the human psyche in a more subtle and complex manner (Schwarz 25), postmodernist fiction appears to show an interest in the interrelation between subjectivity and the other, because only the abandonment of a selfish behaviour can lead to the decrease of