Ethics, Self and The Other

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 and 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).