Language and Subjectivity

As has been pointed out above, Levinas, in his early work up to Totality and Infinity, thinks the radical alterity spatially in the term “exteriority.” In Otherwise than Being and in his more recent work, in an attempt to avoid the problem of phenomenality which adheres to the face as a visible presence, he employs the distinction between “the Said”and “the Saying,”a reflection of his turn to language for the expression of radical difference. In Levinas’s thinking, language arises from difference and hence institutes ethics—i.e., language breaks down the interiority of the subject. Discourse in so doing engages the human subject in the ethical situation of violence and the first ethical command to resist such violence. In other words, what Levinas later perceives is the paradox thatonly in discourseisone’ssubjectivity engaged, yet one must always be open firstto “thecalloftheother. For Levinas, the ethical subject of discourse is thus the subject that articulates and expresses this dilemma in response to the highest ethical demand. Put differently, while being always already caught and defined by frameworks that are not of one’s own conscious

choice or making, the ethical subject nevertheless is demanded to undertake as one’s ethical responsibility to make more choice and decision-making than one could ever possibly accomplish.

Echoing the Levinasian paradox, though in far less strident tones, Kristeva defines ethics as a practice that is based on the acceptance of the symbolic law together with the transgression of the law for the purpose of renovating it. Thus, Kristeva does not so much give us a treatise on ethics as a performance of it: “the ethical cannot be stated, instead it is practiced to the point of loss, and the text is one of the most accomplished examples of such a practice”(1984: 234). Stated

differently, ethicsisa“practiceofscription”forwhich thetextcannotbeenvisaged within the myth of representation: it is a performance, a production, actively involving writer and reader alike. Kristeva insists that language was not only a system but a process as well, and that the system of language, although laced with boundaries, incorporated the potential for upheaval, dissolution and transformation. If language is ethical, it is precisely because language itself resists all moral clarities. The salient feature of language is its otherness to whatever can be said, intended, placed,

observed—its simultaneous ubiquity and unlocatability. However, it is pointless to try to imagine a world that is newly altered by language, since the world is always already saturated with language. Kristeva says in her preface to Desire in Language thatwriting asscription “assumesthenecessity ofadopting astanceinvolving otherness, distance, even limitation”as“theonly guaranteeofethics”in aworld of technological rationality (1980a: ix). Language as such is double, both rhythm and structure, both struggle and law; and therefore the writing subject is never either monological reason or asymbolic rhythm, but an unending dialogical, ethical process-production between the two.

In such wise, language provides a powerful model of the dialectic of freedom

and obligation that defines ethics: i.e., to be ethical is to rule and to be ruled. The ethical subject is free and accountable, but submits to the law as to necessity. In just this way, the linguistic subject names the word, but uses the sounds and marks

tradition has bequeathed to it. To put this another way, the linguistic subject

expresses itself, but manipulates the codes and conventions of expression available in its linguistic culture. As a result, while it speaks, it is at the same time spoken of.

Within language, the subject discovers its most intimate and immediate models of activity and passivity, its most compelling forms of resistance. One effect of the power-of-language is to limit the autonomy of the agent, who is humbled before a certain form of words as before the law. Although language enables us to say things, it also constrains us to say them in certain ways. This is to think of language as a structure or system that precedes us such that there can be no understanding of ourselves outside of language. Yet this conception of ourselves as located at a moving intersection has some advantages. By means of it we can avoid the

too-simple either/or choice. We can acknowledge that we live in a world and that, at the same time, we can take shape for us and become a world— though only through the mediation of language and texts.

One of the great dramas of Lawrence’s fiction is precisely this kind of

paradoxical relation between language and the self. For Lawrence, on the one hand, language is spontaneous emanation which can liberate the self from “the unconscious”

into conscious being; on the other hand, the external linguistic system is a system of rules and signs to which human beings are imprisoned. The thematised struggle with language continues to provide the significant focus for his representation of being in the world. Many of the tensions, conflicts, or ambivalences that occur with regard to language recur with regard to the issues of selfhood. Characters in Lawrence’s novels move between the longing to connect with the world through language, and the

recognition that language disconnected us from the world. The role of language, in the process of identifying oneself, is also found to be fundamentally unreliable. Part of what makes Lawrence’s novels so tense and nervous is that they pursue their formal disruptions of character’s identity in language even as they so often sustain nostalgic longing for a whole self.

In effect, Lawrence’s age is an age of narcissism as well as the century in which ego suffered unprecedented attacks upon its great pretension to be

self-transparent and self-authorized. The art of high modernism has often been conceived as pressing to the limits the various social, political, historical,

psychological, and philosophical frameworks in terms of which human action can be described, and consequently as precipitating the“destruction”of ethical subjectivity itself. While Lawrence disconnects himself from high modernism, or specifically, from the Bloomsbury aesthetics, which asserts the autonomy of artistic work, his work reveals the emergence of an ethos where existing ethical frameworks embodying the self encounter their internal limits. His awareness of the shortcomings of our relation to our language opens up the possibility of exploiting those very limitations.

Lawrence argues that “in man’s adventure of self-consciousness he must come to the limits of himself and become aware of something beyond him. A man must be self-conscious enough to know his own limits, and to be aware of that which

surpasses him”(P 185). Without attempting to abolish altogether the language self as an integral ego, Lawrence’s awareness of the way in which language screens us from the reality it discloses anticipates Derrida’s warning that we, as language beings, should try (even impossibly) to get rid of the entanglement of language:

We must . . . try to free ourselves from . . . language. Not actually

attempt to free ourselves from it, for that is impossible without denying our own historic situation. But rather, to imagine doing so. Not actually

free ourselves from it, for that would make no sense and would deprive us of the light that meaning can provide. But rather, resist it as far as possible.¹⁸

In what follows, by examining the recurrent themes of verbal consciousness,

characterization, and authorial intention in Lawrence’s fiction in accordance with his (conscious or unconscious) problematization of language, I aim to explore the multiple ways in which the relationship between language and the ethical self has to do with the development of a relationship between the writer and his writing, between the user of language and the structure and texture of the language used.