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also by “absence.” Unlike experiences of the there is, the illuminated space (or the things of the day world) is the source of this or that; is “something” that responds to us;
is our being able to fix a substantive to it; is a subjective mind which finds itself faced with an apprehended exterior (Levinas 1978: 58). On the contrary, the rustling of the
there is is a horror (Levinas 1978: 60). It is a horror that demands further definition. If I
can compare, it is Kurt’s horror in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.2 The horror of the night, or of the there is, reveals to us neither a danger of death, nor even a danger of pain, but provokes in us a watchfulness and alertness toward the suspicion of total comprehension. This alertness is the philosophical consideration lingering in Levinas’s concern of existence and subjectivity. And as realized in the idea of time, this suspicion develops into a concern of facing the other in hospitality. It is a philosophicaldevelopment that moves from the horror of the night as an experience of the there is towards the welcome of the unknown. In other words, it is a turn away from viewing darkness as “the very play of existence which would play itself out” (Levinas 1978: 64).
This there is warns people against a comprehensive confidence in knowing and giving.
King Lear gives gifts to his daughters with hope of compensation, of re-pay, and fails to acknowledge the impossibility of relationship, which cannot be resolved by gift-giving.
King Lear thus is a story that contains the trauma of this existential impasse.
In addition, the there is is a phenomenon expressed by the darkness of the night.
The night stands out because at night there is no perspective, and subjects do not refer to each other as they do in illuminated space (Levinas 1978: 58). The metaphor of the night reminds us of the nights in the Arabian classic, the Arabian Nights. I, therefore, argue that the horror of the there is is dispelled by Shahrazad’s plots of gift-giving and hospitality on the wedding night—the night of consummation and under the shadow of slaughter. I also argue that Shahrazad’s nights are the nights of the there is because she does not know which night will be her last. For three years she witnesses the there is in reality and in her stories of uncertainty and transgression.
2 In this regard, I refer the reader to my M.A. thesis The Uncanny in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: Heimlich and Unheimlich in the Text and the Criticism. National Tsinghua U. 2000.
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We also need to read the Arabian Nights from the angle of time spans. As Levinas contrasts the difference between the journeys taken by Odysseus and Abraham, he avers that the latter is a departure without return. Abraham’s journey is a one-way movement, which is not subordinated to thoughts of presence, rationality, or calculations.3 A magnificent expression of patience, this one-way movement is disinterested in reciprocity, and this patience simultaneously indicates an agent who “act[s] without entering the promised land” (Levinas 1986: 349). To be patient means to enter into the time of the other,4 to go beyond one’s personal time, one’s personal capacity, and even one’s own possibilities. It is at this point that Levinas seems to agree with Lyotard, even though there are undeniable differences between their philosophies. For Levinas, future belongs to the other in a movement of “profitless investment” that occurs when the subject faces the other (Levinas 1986: 350). For Lyotard, the future is what makes the present possible, and thus reverses the a posteriori to the a priori. In gift-giving, Lyotard says that a person gives because he assumes he will receive a return gift in the future. The future, according to Lyotard, is influencing the subject’s current actions. If we apply Lyotard’s theory, we can argue that in hospitality, the hosts welcome even before they are visited. The subjectivity is opened to the other a priori: the other is visited even before he pays this visitation. The host is not late in welcoming; on the contrary, the subject welcomes in advance. But Derrida says otherwise. He argues instead that hospitality always makes the subject, the host, already late. It is because the host is never able to welcome enough and welcome in time. For Derrida, hospitality consists in welcoming the other who does not warn me of his coming. The host is stunned by his visit. The host is structurally “lacking” because s/he is not able to totally meet the guest’s horizon of expectation. The host has to ask for forgiveness for the lack of preparation, for an irreducible and constitutive unpreparedness (Derrida 1986: 381).
In the opening scene of the Arabian Nights, King Shahryar’s hospitality to Shahrazad’s
3 Levinas refers the word “thought” to the utility epistemology presented by classical philosophy.
4 Ibid. 349. See how Blanchot glosses the idea of being patient: “Patience has already withdrawn me…from my power to be patient: if I can be patient then patience has not worn out in me that me to which I cling for self-preservation.” Maurice Blanchot, (The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. 13.)
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visitor at that first night demonstrates how actions that should happen are eternally deferred. This particular night is not any regular night; it is a unique, individual (but chained) night because the night acts as a premonition of slaughter. It is a time when the King Shahryar kills whoever he marries after each wedding night. It is unique and chained because each night he marries a different woman, and each following morning he puts to death the woman of the same title—his queen. The first section of her stories in Shahrazad’s boxes of tales is not contingent. It is a story about how a revengeful demon, after his son was killed accidentally by a traveling Sheikh, learns to forgive by listening to others’ misfortune and welcoming the unexpected in life. I point out that the demon’s change (transformation) is closely connected with his hosting of the Sheikhs passing by, each of whom gives him either a story of gift-giving, or of hospitality. This scenario brings us to Levinas’s argument. In Levinas’s idea, the host is preparing to ask for forgiveness, not miserably, but humbly and transcendentally. It is only in this sense that the host is a genuine host. So it is indeed the master, the inviting host, who becomes the hostage in our exploration of subjectivity. In the moment of hospitality, “it ends up in substitution for another, in the condition—or the unconditionality—of being a hostage” (Levinas 1998a: 180). The demon, as well as the King Shahryar, becomes the hostage in the house of God after they host those whom they were not supposed to.
I also politicize hospitality so that any ethical discussion of hospitality is not merely filed away in an ivy tower. In our discussion, hospitality performs and
transforms more than the existent laws themselves can allow, because it is hospitality extended to the third, to an invisible other, to God. No one can forever be at home. Once again, we think of Freud’s remarkable discovery of the ambivalent connotation of the German word das Heimlich. Heimlich means the familiar, friendly, cheerful,
comfortable, intimate, and being at home. It can also refer to that which is hidden, secret, obscured and the unfamiliar.5 Is it not the case that in the biblical story of Abraham sacrificing his son, he speaks the language of heimlich or uncanniness? This is because
5 Freud, “The Uncanny,” Standard Edition, 17.. XVII. 217-56.
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Abraham utters secrecy in the most conspicuous way by taking Isaac out with him and acting as if there is no need to hide.
By sketching the desire of approaching the other, I propose that what is implied in gift-giving and hospitality entails the proximity of the absolute other. The adventures, which offer itself as a horizon-shifting (or perhaps horizon-magnifying) perspective on living experience, underscore the tragedy of King Lear and tales from the Arabian
Nights. In genuine hospitality and gift-giving, these adventures present the possibility of
enlarging our living horizon (and to the extent of approaching the absolute other) in terms of genuineness.This possibility of approaching the absolute other distinguishes gift-giving and hospitality when it reveals a different reflection on ethics. In chapter IV I discussed
King Lear and its significance via Bataille’s philosophy of waste, Freud’s death instincts,
and Levinas’s emphasis on the emptiness of subjectivity. In chapter V on the ArabianNights I discussed the Jinni’s tale. I used this tale to argue that an alienated, almost
broken, I-Thou relationship is eternally strengthened and stretched through theunfulfilled wish of gift-giving, and henceforth the absence of the receiver is constantly brought into the subject’s memory. A seemingly eternal break, a crevice of ontology, this absence becomes so strong that no altruistic consideration can provide a remedy. Truly, going-beyond or approaching the “absolute other” confronts bourgeois philosophy where “kindness and good deeds become a sin, domination and suppression virtue” (M.
Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno 81). While Levinas’s philosophy is allegedly a fundamental intermingling of self and the other6, the function of gift-giving as a signifier is also in the spotlight.
In this aspect, Levinas’s and Lacan’s arguments on ethics and inter-personal relations are two different yet significantly related projects.7 After I finished detailing
6 For example, commentary pieces like Colin Davis’ description on Levinas’ philosophy at
“Antelme, Renoir, Levinas and the Shock of the Other” French Cultural Studies.2003; 14: 41-51. web.
http:// www.fitzroydearborn.com/london/cmft/Davis-Levinas.htm.
7 Kenneth Reinhard’s “Kant with Sade, Lacan with Levinas” shares our mutual concerns on this topic by pointing out that from now on our reading “are not so much grouped into ‘families’ defined by similarity and difference, as into ‘neighborhoods’ determined by accidental continuity, genealogical
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the beyond I-Thou relation at the level of Levinasian metaphysics and illustrated its connections with literature, I applied one typical Lacanian idea of the eternal lack, namely the object a, and Freud’s death instincts in the discussion of the Jinni’s gift of death and King Lear’s destructive decision.
One question, however, remains after the completion of this dissertation. The question involves the choice we have to make when approaching the (absolute) other. It is also a question about God and the neighbor. As recognized by many, “love is the culmination of Levinas’s discourse with the Other” (Steven Gans, “Levinas and Pontalis” The Provocation of Levinas 88). Nevertheless, Derrida offers one important critique to Levinas’s “love” and “ethics.” Let me recap Levinas before discussing Derrida’s critique:
As stated in the chapter on background theory, for Levinas, the very possibility of the beyond is expressed in an ethical turnabout. It is a reference [renvoi] from what we desire to what we deem undesirable, and “in this strange mission commanding the approach to the other, God is pulled out of objectivity, out of presence and out of being.
He is neither object nor interlocutor. His absolute remoteness, his transcendence, turns into my responsibility…for the other” (Levinas 2008a: 69). God’s otherness turns into my responsibility for the other. God, as the wholly other, is to be found everywhere, in each other, because there is a possibility that my neighbor or my loved ones are as inaccessible to me, as secret and transcendent as God is. It is because I cannot
completely comprehend God; therefore, I do not expect to completely comprehend my guest, my gift receiver, as well as the courses, trajectories of my host and gift-giving.
The question Derrida asks is: How can Levinas’s Love become realized when “Levinas is no longer able to distinguish between the infinite alterity of God and that of every human: his [Levinas’s] ethics is already a religion” (Derrida 2008: 84)? Unlike Levinas, Derrida’s philosophy is an ethical philosophy that claims Tout autre est tout autre: every
isolation, and ethical encounter” (785). He contends that “by in turn reading Lacan ‘with’ Levinas, as neighbors who, although coming from distinct traditions and aiming at different ends, together articulate the primacy of responsibility and jouissance to being and knowing, we can begin to imagine an ethics otherwise than sacrifice, to hear the call of a good after the dialectic of Good and Evil” (786).
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other (one) is every (bit) other: “In one case God is defined as infinitely other, as the wholly other. In the other case it is declared that every other one, each of the others, is God inasmuch as he or she is, like God, wholly other” (Derrida 2008: 87). Levinas objects to Derrida’s logic because it signifies an ethical generality. Levinas worries that the singularity of the self would be lost in the ethical generality of Tout autre est tout
autre (Levinas 1996:76; Derrida 2008: 79). Derrida argues that Levinas’s critique
cannot help determine the boundary between absolute singularity on one hand, and a claimed generality of ethics, on the other. He says Levinas “stays within the game—the play of difference and analogy—between the face of God and the face of my neighbor, between the infinitely other as God and the infinitely other as another human” (Derrida 2008: 86). Derrida’s critique of Levinas made me wonder how to describe the otherness of God and the otherness of other human beings after I raised the idea of the ethics of the third (God/the absolute other).The concept of responsibility is aporia when my responsibility to my hosts may damage my responsibility to my family. I try not to emphasize good conscience in my discussion of hospitality and gift-giving, as I’ve drawn examples from the Bible, King
Lear, and the Arabian Nights, knowing that, on the one hand, as Derrida points out, the
resources of responsibility are inexhaustible; on the other hand, it is as Levinas’s call that the subject has responsibility for the death of the Other because the subject’s existence is never carefree, naïve perseverance (Levinas 1989: 86). This responsibility is hospitality’s aporia, and its “value.” The concept of love is also a response to the Other, and that is the aporia as well as its “value” in gift-giving. The value of gift-giving and hospitality comes from their knowing the “otherwise,” and still are willing to sayYes to all the unknowable and impossible; it is an inter-person commitment yet
simultaneously refusing to endorse an imaginary consolations, and that is how genuine gift annuls itself and genuine hospitality welcomes without waiting.
My writing thus offers itself by welcoming the infinity of the there is the other, that is, in the form of comments and critiques from my readers.
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