Individuality in DeLillo and Levinas

DeLillo’s probing into the possibility of individuality in an ethical relation may help shed light on the gray area of Levinasian ethics which raises much dispute not merely on the ethical self but on how the self situates himself in the postmodern milieu. Levinasian ethics, stressing the incommesurability and nonindifference of the Other, has an ambiguous part as he contends that the self responds to the Other prior to his consciousness with radical passivity and vulnerability featuring the self.

This causes divergent viewpoints on the relation between the self and the Other.

Levinasian self, according to william large, no longer experiences himself “as a self, but as something other. I become other to myself to such an extent that in this experience we can no longer speak of an ‘I’ or a ‘myself’” (large 2002: 137). Paul Ricoeour further comments that “Levinas fails to do justice to the importance of

self-esteem, and he attributes this failure to the way in which Levinas’s ‘entire

philosophy rests on the initiative of the other in the intersubjective relation’” (Ferreira 451). Nordvedt thus summarizes that “ethics is a paralysis of consciousness created by the intrusion of otherness” (Nordvedt 226). Ricoeur asserts the significance and possibility of the self-esteem by pointing out Levinas’s over-emphasis on the other in the ethical configuration. In contrast, M. Jamie Ferreira holds that “[f]or Levinas, ridding the I of its imperialism does not eliminate ipseity, but confirms it: ‘total altruism’ is said to be compatible with a confirmed self” (Ferreira 452), based on the idea that “I must have a self in order to have something to give” (Ferreira 453).

Divergent views cause great confusion concerning the individuality or autonomy of the self. Besides, while the Other acts as an overwhelming force embedded in the self, could the ethical relation merely be the arena of the Other with the self entirely diminished or dissolved? DeLillo in Mao II surely tends to explore what

individuality the self asserts in responding to the Other.

DeLillo’s observation of individuality is shown in the self’s responsibility for the images of the photographs, on TV and even the image triggering the writing process. In the self’s responding to the image, DeLillo centers on how the self finds a niche to situate and even create himself in the ethical responsibility to the Other.

The self in DeLillo’s ethical mapping is neither dissolved nor silenced. However, his exploration of the individuality of the self might be different from Gammelgaard’s analysis that “ [t]he self is—as Kierkegaard suggests—but is always becoming. The process of becoming oneself is mediated by the other, and following Hegel, this process accordingly can never be conflict-free” (Gammelgaard 102). Despite the agreement that there is no fixed and static identity of the self and, more coincidentally, there is always an other involved in the process of the self-becoming, both

Kierkeggard and Hegel, according to Gammelgaard, imply a synthetic consequence of

the conflicting encounter of the self and the other. This goes against what underlies DeLillo’s and Levinas’ ethical contour. No common ground could be reached between the Other and the self.

DeLillo’s notion of individuality does not mean to reconstruct the illusion of self-autonomy or integrity but intends to map out the actuality of life by responding to the Other in his or her own way in the wake of the unavoidable ethical bond. That is, it is hardly possible to trace the way or the time when the ethical relation is forged.

Nevertheless, in Mao II, DeLillo goes further than what he does in The Names and White Noise to detect what different strategies the characters applied in their response

to language as the Other. Generally speaking, these responses could be divided into two camps. One presents a different angle to deal with the consuming or

submerging crowd implied in the images, and the other paradoxically creates an image to respond to. These two aspects are based on an idea that an image does not merely imply one way of visual interpretation or consumption. An image, like the figural language, always leaves room for the intrusion of different interpretations.

That is, a vision might reduce what an image might suggest. But, paradoxically, an image could not fix up what the vision means to grasp. The former situation is the ethical relation in which the self is left vulnerable and passive to what the image presents. The latter is the aftermath of the ethical bond in which the self’s

responsibility for the Other is imbued with new possibilities which reassure the self’s creativity. An image, then, resembles two sides of a coin. Paradoxically speaking, exposing the self to the imposing Other, the image simultaneously salvages himself from certain nihilistic existence or self-dissolution. It is when an individual conjures up images to see himself through certain life vacancy in one’s solitude. That is, the sense of the self is achieved in forging and responding to an image as the Other.

Different images construed in the self’s mind would manifest one’s individuality.

What is significant, it is the self’s individuality with which something new is added to the world. In other words, DeLillo’s ethical observation does not end up with the self-dissolution or nullification of the self but tries to demist the gray area of the ethical relation and shed light on the self’s individuality and creativity. More remarkable is that DeLillo’s ethical loop,¹⁰ though stressing the overwhelming Other as Levinas does, insists on the concern for self-individuality, a force to renew life possibilities.

Conclusion

DeLillo’s observation of life in the postmodern age is focused on the

exploration of language as the ethical Other. As Lyotard claims that “the incredulity towards grand narratives” features the postmodern condition, criteria and values are highly suspected of their validity or universality. Totalization or homogenization are defied as difference-reducing or other-suppressing, which alerts the thinkers to the nature of language. No longer regarded as a transparent representation of any possible meaning or intention, language is more message than medium. Though theorists mean to figure out what lies behind language or what language actually designates, there is always an incomprehensible but perpetual enigma, which

Emmanuel Levinas takes as the ethical Other. More remarkably, the irreducible and incomprehensible part of language called the saying designates an inevitable relation with the self. It corresponds to DeLillo as language has been the serious concern shown in the ethical trilogy. Language as the ethical Other, to DeLillo, is divided into three aspects: language as the ethical reading of the wor(l)d, death as the

10 The ethical loop is two-folded in DeLillo’s novelistic presentation. The first one concerns the relation between the self and language as the Other which goes from the spatial to the temporal and back to the spatial again, while the other concerns the emphasis of the ethical relation which rests on the imposing and haunting Other to the diminished and dissolved self and back to the self with individuality.

corporeal language, and the language of image. The first two parts emphasize language as the ethical Other who is not merely irreducible and incomprehensible but self-overwhelming, self-diminishing and even self-othering. The third part goes to a significant but less-discussed issue of the ethical relation—the possibility of

individuality. That is, DeLillo goes further than Levinas in examining the new possibilities of the self in the ethical relation. On the one hand, DeLillo marks his perspective by making a way out of the gray area in Levinas’s ethics which raises counter perspectives on the notion of the self, either partially sustained or completely diminished. On the other hand, DeLillo’s exploration of individuality makes a significant response to the controversial notions of the provisional, contingent and evanescent subject in the postmodern age. Most of all, individuality in DeLillo is potential in re-molding humanism in the postmodern age as personal creativity, originality and freedom are distinctly presented in the ethical configuration.