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KING LEAR AND HIS OTHERWISE BEING
Goneril: ‘Tis his own blame; hath put himself from rest, And must needs taste his folly. (King Lear II. iv. 288-89)
“I must know how to give what I possess.” (Levinas 2000b: 171)
King Lear, a Shakespearian drama being stated in every possible form, explores
eternal themes of love, life and death. Scholars and critics have offered manyingenious and diverse interpretations of King Lear. But few paid attention to the nature and significance of Lear’s disillusion of (filial) love via the confrontation of hospitality after he gives his kingdom as a gift to the love-professing daughters. The scene of his madness in the heath certainly is one of the most dramatic events in the tragedy where King Lear is exposed to a general openness, to an alterity without name, without identity; nevertheless, this scene of the full-blown madness does not
illuminate much the transformation of a strong ruler to an anguished mind. Reflecting on Levinas’s philosophy of existence, which argues for a refusal of complacent
commitment to existence, we shall stop rebuking King Lear’s seeming irresponsibility and forge a new interpretation of King Lear’s life journey. In the tragedy, King Lear proposes to give his daughters the gift of his kingdom, authority, and kingship.
Considering the fact that King Lear’s identity is related to his kingdom, authority, and kingship, I argue that he actually gives away a gift of his existence. He gives away what he has been identified with. In this strange refusal of living “properly” as he is accustomed to at the approaching of his aging and thus inevitable death, he actually
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encounters a Levinasian transcendence of existence.1 Death, for Levinas, realizes the possibility of life (2000a: 43, 113).2 In what follows, I wish to tease out some of the issues thrown up by this arresting statement. While it is obvious that King Lear gives out of the pressure of time, of the approaching death,3 I intend to show the new form of life for King Lear when he perceives the coming of death and “unwisely” proposes to give and be hosted by the gift-receivers.
Resorting to Derrida’s critique of the gift, Levinas’s philosophy of subjectivity and existence in the world4, I will also illustrate viewpoints from Georges Bataille on general economy and add a Lacanian psychoanalytical approach, thinking that by combining these four analytic angles our discussion shall offer one of the best strategies in unraveling the dynamics and meaning of King Lear’s unusual initiative of life. Through the reading of King Lear, therefore, the following discussion paves the way for presenting King Lear by assessing the following phenomena first.
I. The Conceptual Genealogy of Gift-giving in Anthropology and Philosophy It is true that gift-giving has a symbolic meaning, and sometimes it is an
extemporaneous gesture to confirm the giver’s generosity. In the western society, the unreciprocated gift left the receiver felling inferior and vengeful at the intrusion on one’s independence and the incursion of the debt to repay. In the Middle East, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II (r.1876-1909) in the late phase of his endangered
1 Cf. Levinas’s philosophy on existence at his first main work Existence and Existents,
especially chapter II: The Relationship with Existence and the Instant. For conventional interpretation of King Lear’s political irresponsibility, see Betty Kantor Stuart.
2 See also a good compiling effort by Sun Xiangchen on Levinas’s death. (孫向晨, <<面對他 者—萊維納斯哲學思想研究>> 上海: 上海三聯書店, 2008. 100.)
3 Jeffrey Stern has a convincing article on the connection between King Lear’s aging and his plan for Cordelia. For his argument that King Lear’s plan is not only political but also imbued with psychological and individual motivations, see “King Lear: The Transference of the Kingdom”
Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 299-308. JSTOR. Web.
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/2870480>.
4 Levinas argues for a stripping of subjectivity beyond nudity and forms. See Levinas, 2006:15.
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empire, which was then besieged by the Western powers in the nineteenth century, often staged gift-giving and other ceremonies to present himself as a caring father.
Gift-giving is a symbol of the imperial paternalism to call forth the consolidation of the huge amount of Ottoman subjects scattered in the empire over vast territory and living under rules of different religious communities (Quataert 166).
Sometimes a gift represents a regrettable memory. When there is no way to claim superiority, one of the underdog’s excuses is that their opponent’s property was originally a gift given by them. Descendants of an old time gift-giver boost the grace and authority which their forefathers used to enjoy, and wonder if their ancestor had kept the given gift, they might have some chance to be the most prosperous
generation now. While one’s identity is to be elaborated and the other’s is to be opposed, the difference between the gift-giver and the gift-receiver is magnified symbolically. For example, when asked about a tribal map of territorial contention, one of the interviewees claims that “The other tribes don’t have any land except what we granted them as a gift” (Shyrock 60). The gift given away in this historical context becomes a bitter memory of irrevocable loss and self-asserted complacence. It is a bitter memory because, as a result of the land-giving, the tribes which used to be the receiver of gift-land from the narrator’s tribe now are more thriving than the giver. It is a narration of self-asserted superiority because it is the narrator’s tribesmen who gave the gift.
A. From Exchange to Gift-Giving
The etymology of gift and its functions in human society are not a recent invention in philosophical and theological circles.5 The symbolic meaning of gift-giving is one of the more durable features of philosophical and sociological
5 See Marcel Mauss, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Pierre Bourdieu.
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reflection in the history of contemporary thoughts. Anthropologists try to verify their research in societies of very different cultural backgrounds. Let me try to spell out further the radicality of this universal symbolism in different milieu. For example, an anthropological study in many Middle East societies found that a wedding without distributing and exchanging gifts is too lonely to be a legitimate social contract at all:
In an Arab society, before the formal public request of the bride’s hand during a ceremony at her home, which in Arabic is called khatab, people publicly deliver a large gift of sugar to the bride’s household. The more well-off the brides are, the more people are involved in escorting the gift, from musicians to women from the
neighborhood, and the more public the delivery of the gift is (Eickelman 161). To a certain degree, this gift-giving is related to the divorce rate there because the
economic and social status of the woman implied in the gifts collected or received is the main factor influencing congeal happiness. Many are divorced because minimal bridewealth was paid (Maher 196-98). Some influential anthropologists also illustrate, through detailed examples drawn from their field studies, that marriages are matters as serious as waging wars or making big business deals, and are outcomes of
strategies involving a wide range of symbolic and material interests. And any specific marriage ultimately relates to what is exchanged. These include the exchange of fertility, filiation, inheritance or anything related to productive resources, values of honor, and prestige. The exchange implies or manifests social status and sometimes ethnic identity. In the end, the very essence of Middle Eastern marriage system is part of an exchange system through the form of gift-giving (Bourdieu 43-52; Tapper 400-405; Eickelman 158-65).
The gift on the other times serves as a bribing material. This reality is illustrated in the tradition of Bedouins collecting khawa. It is a gift that must be given even against the will of the giver, and even if by giving it, the giver acknowledges one’s
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tribal inferiority. What they call khawa is like a tax, though literally it means
brotherhood. The khawa is the right of brotherhood between the people who become brothers. I give you the khawa so that I am protected by you. Peasants pay this kind of tax to tribesmen, and despite its brotherly term, no pretense of fraternal amity exists between the two parts. “The Bedouin tribes people will assert without slightest qualm that khawa was imposed on the weak (that is, the peasants) against their will.”6 In this social context of giving khawa, the gift-giving is to exchange security and there is a strong sense of class disparity.
Back to western society, because of the felicity of its rhetoric and the
resourcefulness of its strategies, Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss have long acknowledged the phenomena of people managing exchange in order to demonstrate hierarchy or equality in tribal equality or political power. Their reflection in
primordial societies focuses on observing the political agenda. Mauss is one of the earliest scholars who toned the system of exchange with rationality in gift-giving.
Barter arose from the system of gifts given and received on credit,
simplified by drawing together the moments of time which had previously been distinct….There is nothing to suggest that any economic system which has passed through the phase we are describing was ignorant of the idea of credit, of which all archaic societies around us are aware. This is a simple and realistic manner of dealing with the problem… of the “two moments of time’ which the contract unites. (Mauss 1970: 35)
In other words, gift-giving and exchange are performed under rational calculation including the object given and the interest it will generate in time interval. Mauss and
6 Recited from Abu Jaber by Shryock 79.
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Lévi-Strauss observe the social activities referring to gift exchanges or Potlatch in primitive or archaic types of society7. They say it is a phenomenon under spectrum of group activity rather than of individual choice. They conclude that gift-giving—or exchange in their studies—actually is a kind of political power-wrestling activity between at least two groups of tribal people in the same community. “In theory such gifts are voluntary but in fact they are given and repaid under obligation” (Mauss1970:
1). The commonly held activity of exchange, Mauss claims, is “essentially usurious and extravagant,﹝and﹞it is above all a struggle among nobles to determine their position in the hierarchy to the ultimate benefit, if they are successful, of their own clans” (Mauss 1970: 4-5). This agonistic type of total prestation he proposes to call
“the potlatch.” It is this observation on economy of exchange, calculation, and requirement of obligation which makes gift-giving “undesirable” in Derrida’s contention on the gifts.
B. Gift-Giving as Unreasonable Expenditure
Gift-giving is thus a symbolic capital in a non-commercial way. Bataille, one of the major thinkers in sociology of the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, on the contrary, argues for an unproductive, consumptive, squandering expense which defines the workings of a “general economy.” The idea of general economy represents his point in the philosophy of transgression. Bataille’s observation that life exceeds calculation of necessity based on production and reproduction overturns the view of restrictive economy, which conceives economic activities in terms of particular operations with limited ends (Bataille 1988: 22, 25, 39). Bataille’s philosophy of squandering thus transforms our customary conception of value.
7 Since Mauss has a book dedicated to the gift, his phrases are quoted in the following
discussion. For readers interested in Lévi-Strauss’ observation on social behavior of the exchange based on the principle of reciprocity, see The Elementary Structure of Kinship. Boston: Beacon, 1969. 55, 62.
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Bataille thinks that there is another social totality of base matter which “is external and foreign to ideal human aspirations, and it refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines” aspiring for community in communism (Botting and Wilson 9). Aligning with Mauss and others discussing a primary notion of expenditure, Bataille presents a cosmic movement of energy that underlies
production in order to have more to expend, and it is about the economy of gift-giving.
Furthermore, Bataille’s description of expenditure underlies a secondary notion of expenditure which involves the language, the unconscious, and all productive
activities and the detours and deferrals that they effect (without cause) in the continual movement of expenditure (Botting and Wilson 10). Disparate phenomena and
unproductive expenditure originate or derive their meanings from the experience of loss on a grand scale. Opposing the principle of classical utility that human society is to acquire and preserve resources, Bataille argues for the more fundamental desire of squandering resources and energies. “Human life cannot in any way be limited to the closed system assigned to it by reasonable conceptions” and this life starts only “with the deficit of these systems through seemingly reckless and disordered economic activities” (Bataille 1985: 128). While many still believe that human nature expresses and fulfills itself in productive labor, Bataille contends that unproductive expenditure is the primary datum (Bataille 1985: 117). We may infer from this statement that, for Bataille, the goal of life is not fulfillment but transcendence of oneself—by
transcendence I refer to a life which is not being characterized by economy but rather by excess and nonproductive expenditure. To put it in another fashion, while the praise of life is about everything admirable and positive, and is a systematic account of the realms of values, the ambivalence that one finds in life and the uncanny dimension of it could usher in Dionysian joy.
Bataille’s argument brings us to Freud’s theory on the death instincts (or death
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drive) which contradicts the pleasure principle of living (or named as the life instincts, Eros) (Freud XVIII 22, XXIII 149, 243; Lo 78). “We shall find courage to assume that there really does exist in the mind a compulsion to repeat which overrides the pleasure principle” (XVIII 22). The death instincts, briefly speaking, “are to begin with
directed inwards and tend towards self-destruction, but they are subsequently turned towards the outside world in the form of the aggressive or destructive instinct”
(Laplanche and Pontalis 97). It is the unreasonable waste, as an expression of destruction and its symbolization, links Bataille’s philosophy of transgression with Freud’s theory of self destructive instinct. While Bataille’s theory is relevant to economics, and Freud’s theory is connected to sociological and psychological
phenomena,8 there is arguably a desire of sublimation involved (Lacan 1997: 203). In Levinas’s philosophy, in contrast to Hegelianism and Platonism, is not the
accomplishment of subjectivity but its very inadequacy which exposes the restless desire for the absolute other (Kearney 117). Arguments of Freud, Bataille, and
Levinas suggest that irrationality and waste can be a form of sublimation, an elevation to a transcendental meaning of life, or Being. This waste, or desire, here reveals itself not in “significance” (if significance is the word) of deficiency but as positivity when we interpret positivity to be an existence exceeded by a demented suffering of pure misery exactly as Levinas illustrated the Saying of existence in Otherwise than Being (153).9
8 According to Lacan, the death drive as a destruction drive is specifically developed by Bernfeld and Feitilberg. Freud himself stops at the point of Nirvana or annihilation principle.
Nevertheless, it is no doubt that Freud is the one who discovered the beyond pleasure principle. See The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 211.
9 Cf Levinas’s section on “From Saying To The Said, Or The Wisdom Of Desire”: “Not includable in the present, refractory to thematization and representation, the alterity of the neighbor calls for the irreplaceable singularity that lies in me....the uniqueness of oneself...the defection of identity is a for-the-other...expos[ing what can be outlined] as essence. This iteration of exposure is expression, sincerity, saying. To not be reabsorbed into meaning, the patience of passivity must be always at the limit, exceeded by a demented suffering, “for nothing,” a suffering of pure misery.
Saying prolongs this extreme passivity, despite its apparent activity (2006:153. emphasis added).
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In Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear, King Lear gives away his kingdom to his least favorite heiresses, who humiliate him and destroy his pleasure and identity in the world after inheriting from him the territory and authority. Therefore, the first scene of
King Lear has been described as improbable because Lear’s decision regarding
distributing his land and authority proves to be dominated by a swift wrath.10 Lear invites his daughters’ declarations of love to be the entitlement of his kingdom. In this context, despite that King Lear used to have a complacent and complete life, he makes others the masters of his house and authority. In what follows, I wish to tease out some of the issues thrown up by the arresting statement of Levinasian subjectivity and Derridian the (impossible) gift: King Lear’s subjectivity is renounced via a denial of the ethics of hospitality and the turmoil initiated by a mis-given. King Lear, therefore, is about the process of a subjectivity being intruded and scattered by giving away the possessed as a gift to the other, resisting the temptation of reducing the alterity of every other to the rubric of every identifiable features of a stable being, of the very criteria whereby we distinguish and differentiate one kind of happiness in life from the other. Furthermore, as a family, the interactions among King Lear’s family
members sometimes seem intimate; at very specific points of time, there seems to be a long, irremediably emotional alienation among them. The elder children who are given abundantly are not obligated to filial obligation or any other affection. In a word, the family members act more like neighbors, which assume a relationship of
heterogeneity and infinite renunciation in our discussion. The transformation of their reaction to each other manifests the endless dialects of family and enemy, assimilation and asymmetry in classic contention on the Uncanny since Freud.
10 It has been a convention of criticism since Samuel Tailor Coleridge, who regarded King Lear’s division of his state as foolish, even absurd before he is too old to rule or die. However, Harry V.
Jaffa has successfully demonstrated that Lear’s plan is a necessity in the realm of Realpolitik. See “The Limits of Politics: King Lear, Act I, scene i” in Shakespeare’s Politics, Allan Bloom with Harry Jaffa.
New York: Basic Books, 1964. 113-45.
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II. King Lear
What is more tranquil than a musk-rose blowing In a green island, far from all men’s knowing?
More healthful than the leafiness of dales?
More secret than a nest of nightingales?
More serene than Cordelia’s countenance?
John Keats, “Sleep and Poetry,” lines 5-9
Some may argue that Lear’s intention of giving is not sincere enough because he simply abdicates the kingdom when he is tired: In Shakespeare’s drama, Lear, the aging king of Britain, decides to step down from the throne and announces his plan to divide his kingdom among his three daughters. First, however, he puts his daughters through a profession-of-love test, asking each to tell him how much she loves him.
Goneril and Regan, Lear’s older daughters, give their father flattering answers. The climax of this famous Shakespeare tragedy appears when Cordelia, Lear’s youngest
Goneril and Regan, Lear’s older daughters, give their father flattering answers. The climax of this famous Shakespeare tragedy appears when Cordelia, Lear’s youngest