Love and the Self/Other Relation

In the first few decades of the 20^thcentury, major works in philosophy, literature, art, and psychoanalysis viewed human relatedness in new ways. Phenomenologists of encounter began with modes of being with others and viewed the concept of the individual as derivative and secondary. That development in the history of

philosophy established the primacy of being with others over being an isolated self.

For instance, in contrast to philosophies that started with the individual and then sought to bridge the gap between the individual and the other, Martin Buber,

Levinas’s spiritual predecessor, began with the bridge itself: “In the beginning is the relation”(53). Buber emphasizes the between because the I-Thou relation is prelinguistic, undifferentiated, and unmediated, while the I-It relations lack the spontaneity, intimacy, and genuineness of I-Thou relations. Love in this sense is a reciprocal encounter between responsible equals in a direct relation.

Levinas admired Buber for having conceived the relationship with the Other as

one of pure otherness and transcendence. Yet a relationship based on reciprocity between the I and the Thou is problematic for Levinas who prefers a relationship that is based on an asymmetrical responsibility for the other. Levinas observes that “the other is what I myself is not”and that “only what is other can elicit an act of

responsibility”(1989: 67). Accordingly he reproaches the I-Thou relationship for being reciprocal and symmetrical, thus committing violence against height, and especially against separateness and secretiveness. By deliberately deemphasizing the “as yourself”in the Judaeo-Christian love command, Levinas tries to turn us away from ourselves toward the other. In his opinion, any ethical system that understands the other as simply “like the self”will be unable to respond adequately to the other’s uniqueness and singularity. For Levinas, such a reduction of self/other relation amounts to a kind of subjective colonialism, where all the other’s desires are reduced to the desires of the “home country,”the self. Moreover, the equality implied by the

“as yourself”promotes the kind of “bookkeeping”arrangement that Levinas equates with “reciprocity.”

Certainly, Levinas’s ethics of other-centeredness has been criticized for failing to offer a conception of moral agency adequate to ground its imperative and for

encouraging self-hatred. For instance, Paul Ricoeur suggests that Levinas’s ethics implies the “substitution of self-hatred for self-esteem”(168). For Ricoeur, both a You and an I are needed in the love relationship. Fulfillment of the commandment to love the other requires genuine love of self. However, Levinas’s attempt to respect the alterity of the other involves an absolute separation and a dissymmetry that render impossible an ethical self. Ricoeur attributes this failure to the way in which

Levinas’s “entire philosophy rests on the initiative of the other in the intersubjective relation”(188). Moreover, the effort to focus only on the self’s responsibility can, despite its good intentions, return the spotlight to the self. That is, the effort to prevent our obsession with assessing the other’s obligation carries with it the threat of

taking our attention away from the other altogether, by enshrining another kind of self-centeredness in making the self supreme in its agency loving.¹⁰

Indeed, it is well known that Levinas asserts an “asymmetry”in the self’s relation to the other that is “the very basis of ethics”(1984: 67). “The ethical rapport with the face is asymmetrical in that it subordinates my existence to the other”(1984:

60). Levinas’s repeated appeal to metaphor of “height”and “master,”affirming that the other is higher than me, indicates that the self and other are not equal when one is talking about the immediate claim of responsibility or love.¹¹ The question that remains is whether Levinas’s emphasis on asymmetry precludes the possibility that in some sense I am equal to the other. In effect, Levinas’s attack is directed at what he sees as an excessive emphasis on the autonomy and independence of the self. His emphasis on the initiative of the other thus might be seen as a rhetorically necessary strategy to counter this. Nevertheless, no matter how strong the initiative of the other is, I remain the self who responds to the other, with a freedom that is “different from the freedom of an initiative”(OB 115)—but a responsible freedom

nonetheless.¹² Moreover, the “receiving role”of the self is implied in Levinas’s much-neglected claim that “my ethical relation of love for the other stems from the fact that the self cannot survive by itself alone, cannot find meaning within its own being-in-the-world, within the ontology of sameness”(1984: 60). Levinas here reveals a dimension of the self’s “need”of the other that exposes an important sense in which the other is not simply an intruder or commander and the self is not simply the one who gives without receiving. Put differently, Levinas recognizes that we must somehow “be there”enough to “hear the injunction coming from the other,”but not “there”in the sense of a self fully constituted (OB 115).

In fact, in Otherwise than Being, Levinas explicitly designates talk of equality to the realm of justice, a realm in which the original asymmetry is suspended:

“Whatever the ways that lead to the superstructure of society, in justice the

dissymmetry that holds me at odds with regard to the other will find again law,

autonomy, equality”(OB 127). Justice, according to Levinas, is the domain in which comparison and calculation become not only relevant but necessary; the realm of justice is where we have to try to do what we cannot do—namely, “to compare incomparables”(OB 160). If there were only one other person in the world, the prohibition against murder would be absolute, but as soon as a third enters on the scene it becomes a matter of calculation. That the third looks at me in the eyes of the Other is what secures in Levinas’s thinking the passage from the Other to the Others, the passage from ethics to justice, from inequality in favour of the Other to equality between self and other. Accordingly, despite the limitlessness of my responsibility, I can claim justice for myself because for others I am the Other:

But justice can be established only if I, always evaded from the concept of the ego, always divested of being, always in non-reciprocatabe relationship with the Other, always for the Other, can become an other like the

others . . . . My fate is important. (OB 160-1)

So the asymmetry of my responsibility for the Other no longer means that I cannot expect respect and fair treatment. The question of justice arises whenever there is more than just you and me. The third party makes it possible to escape the moral chaos that Levinas’s ethics might entail. Levinas acknowledged that “in reality”no relationship can be so utterly isolated and abstracted from context as to exclude the relevance or influence of the third. The third always influences both me and the other. So the claim of justice for oneself is an integral part of complex context in which all moral responses are made. However, infinite responsibility does mean that there will always be another who needs me or another need to which I can minister, so the self’s ethical responsibility toward the other can never be accomplished or

finished.

It is in this context that Levinas inverts the usual definition of philosophy from

“the love of wisdom”to “the wisdom of love”: “Philosophy is this measure brought to the infinity of the being-for-the-other of proximity; it is the wisdom of love”(OB161).

“Love”is here employed as a synonym for the ethical, and “wisdom”is the

discursive-theoretical articulation of the ethical in a discourse that aspires to justice.

The love of wisdom by itself, even with the best of intentions, would court the danger of abstraction. The love of love, on the other hand, would be the exclusivity of romantic or erotic love, ultimately not only privileging the beloved above all others, but also privileging the self, self-indulgent. When Levinas describes philosophy as

“the wisdom of love in the service of love”(OB 162), he thus describes the Said said in the service of Saying, in which love has learnt from wisdom and wisdom from love.

In such a way, Levinas shows the necessity for the passage from the Saying to the Said, not the pure Said of war and injustice that precedes the reduction, but what Critchely calls “justified Said,”the Said that is justified through being derived from a prior Saying.¹³ In this sense, Levinasian ethics would not simply be a one-way street from the Same (Self) to the Other, but would also, in a second move, consist in a return to the Same, but a Same that had been altered in itself.

Fundamental to Levinas’s elaboration of the “wisdom of love”in Otherwise than Being is the conception of “proximity.”¹⁴ In the modern conception of otherness, the other is always thereto servetheselfwhich is“seeking in every intercoursemerely achanceto nourish hisidentity” (Bauman 83). In Levinas’s opinion, by contrast, the self is there to serve the other, and it is “difference”that initiates the ethical treatment of the other: “Theselfisnon-indifference to theothers” (OB 171). What Levinas calls “proximity”is precisely this “not indifferent”

response to the difference in the other. Morrissey rightly elaborates Levinas’s notion of “proximity”—the double negative implicit in the phrase “non-indifference”means that, for Levinas, “difference and awareness are related, causally, to each other”

(Morrissey 329). For one thing, this ethical relation to the others based on

“non-indifference”meansthe necessity for heeding the others, responding to them, being affected by them, and most importantly having a concern for them—i.e., “not being indifferent”to them. At the same time, and no less important,

“non-indifference”also implies difference itself, suggesting that love for the other should be founded on the recognition than the appropriation of other’s uniqueness.

On the above account, it should be noted that “proximity”does not refer to a sense of Cartesian distance, but rather to the immediacy of the responsibility demanded by the face. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, “there is nothing really spatial about

proximity”(86). Nearness in this context is not so much the spatial contiguity of two beings as the ethically charged approach to another person—i.e., while I do not merge with the other person, I come closer and open myself to the other, offering myself by moving infinitely nearer. Hence Levinas describes proximity as“the supremepassivity ofexposureto another”(OB 46).¹⁵ And so, proximity is neither a distance bridged, nor a distance demanding to be bridged. Proximity is satisfied with being what it is. The self and other are said there to be separated absolutely by the inexpressible secret of their intimacy. “Relation”now has a double meaning as both

“absolute distance”and “immediacy.” Therefore, the closeness of proximity does not refer to the shortening of distance, or the merger of identities. It refers to waiting, an attention: “Attention is waiting: not an effort, tension, nor mobilization of

knowledge around a certain thing with which one is preoccupied. Attention waits.

It waits without haste”(Blanchot 1993: 74).¹⁶ As has been indicated above, Levinasian ethics is an ethics of caress. The caressing hand remains open and attentive, never tightening into a grip, never “getting hold of.” In such a way, Levinas rejects the romantic conception of love, according to which love would accomplish the fusion of two persons or two souls into one.

Levinas’s notion of “non-indifference”and “proximity”bears striking similarity to the idea of “star-equilibrium”that Lawrence employed in describing Birkin’s ideal

loving relationship with Ursula in Women in Love. Rendering difference a positive meaning, both Lawrence and Levinas oppose the fusional concept of love—they insist on the possibility of both distance and relation. Their conception of love is the one which avoids the fusion of the Other with the Same. In Women in Love, Birkin attacks the old way of love:

Fusion, fusion, this horrible fusion of two beings, which every woman and most men insisted on, was it not nauseous and horrible anyhow, whether it was a fusion of the spirit or of the emotion body? . . . Why could they not remain individuals, limited by their own limits? (WL 353)

Lawrence’s famous image of two stars in tremblingly-balanced conjunction most sharply gives focus to the problem of love: it is a dynamic interrelationship of two equidistant stars whose very “relation”is based on their “distance.”¹⁷ This ideal loving relationship is a way of being together which constantly resists mere merger, and which insists upon the lover’s individual integrity while demanding the full attention of the other. The image of star-equilibrium connotes the tension that draws the two lovers together at the same time as it holds them apart. An interplay of force and counter-force, attraction and repulsion prevents the two beings from merging together and collapsing into each other. In this new dispensation, tension and not release, awareness and not aggressive possession form the basis for the love

relationship. Lilly’scharacterization ofhismarriageto Tanny in Aaron’sRoddefines thiskind ofrelationship:“Thereweare,togetherand apartatthesametime,and free ofeach other,and eternally inseparable”(AR 104).

Accordingly, both Lawrence and Levinas challenge the notion of Platonic love.

Although Levnias has been accused of sublimating erotic love to a Platonic realm of spiritual love in Totality and Infinity, he explicitly subverts the Platonic conception of love in his earlier work. In Time and the Other, Levinas suggests that the pathos of love acknowledges the duality of being as more than a temporary failure; it

accepts the duality as insurmountable:

The pathos of love consists in the insurmountable duality of beings.

Love is a relationship with that which is forever concealed. This

relationship does not neutralize the alterity, but conserves it. The pathos of desire rests in the fact of being two. The other as other is not an object bound to become mine or become me; it retreats on the contrary into its mystery. (TO 86)

By the same token, in contrast to the myth of Platonic love, wherein the two lovers recognize in each other a lost half, and their union brings back a complete single being, Lawrence appeals for total separateness and true individuality between people.

He specifically defines the reality of love as the relating of the incommensurate:

But in the frail, subtle desirousness of the true male, towards everything female, and the equally frail, indescribable desirability of every female for every male, lies the real clue to the equating, or the relating, of things which otherwise are incommensurate. And this, this desire, is the reality which is inside love. (PII 452)

Instead of mimetically assimilating the other through acts of identification (A usurps B), the star-image rhetoricinsistson theother’sothernessasthesourceofthe

magnetic attraction (the difference between A and B holds them together). A tension keeps the two love-objects apart in the process of drawing them together. They exist, less as separate entities, than as the sum of relations that simultaneously detach and attract them.

In spite of their common appeal to radical otherness in the love relationship, as I have indicated above, Lawrence is mainly concerned with the problem of how to connect with the other without annihilating the self, while Levinas is anxious of how to maintain the alterity of the other without subordinating it to the Same. Put another way, while Lawrence is interested in how the self is unlimitedly creative in its

encountering with the (beloved) other, Levinas (especially in his later works) is occupied with the self’s infinite responsibility toward the other. In fact, Levinas repeatedly distances himself from the term “love,”preferring for the term

“responsibility.” For him, the word “love”fails to announce strongly enough that “I am ordered toward the face of the other,”who “commands”me (OB 11).¹⁸

Consequently, though both celebrate an excess of being (or otherwise than being), Lawrence invites an overflow of self-affirmation, and yet Levinas calls for an

affirmation of the other. In other words, while Levinas proclaims dying for the other as the very meaning of love, for Lawrence, each lover should be responsible first and foremost to his/her own feeling, and accordingly, for him, self-sacrifice is the most irresponsible mode of love relationship. In a nutshell, if Lawrentian love aims at self-blossoming through the general economy of energy and discharge brought by love, the ultimate manifestation of Levinasian love is a kind of radical altruism, selfless generosity.

Even so, in their assertion of the possibility of both absolute distance and intimate relation, both Lawrence and Levinas face the problem proposed by Derrida:

ifeveryoneexperiencesLevinas’sradicalalterity then itisasimilarity,nota

difference. ForDerrida,“theotherisabsolutely otheronly ifheisan ego,thatis,in acertain way,ifheisthesameasI”(VM 127). On that account, what Levinas

considered radical alterity is, for Derrida, a radical similarity, even if that similarity is otherness, or difference (VM 128). Beyond that, Lawrence encounters the same problem as Levinas does— i.e., if all people are irrevocably separate from each other, can there be any achievable harmony in the universe? To put this another, if love were considered just the recognition of “insurmountable duality of beings,”how would it differ from sheer callousness and indifference (either to the other or to the self)? While Levinas attempts to counterbalance infinite responsibility towards the other by introducing the idea of the third party, Lawrence treats the articulation of

“star equilibrium”in his fiction as a problem and issue rather than as a solution. Bell thus describes Lawrence’s employment of this image: “Far from being naturalized as the given structure of their relationship, the image is introduced as a speculative and highly problematicpossibility”(1991: 98).¹⁹ As I hope to show in the following discussion, while the “star-equilibrium”image is introduced by Birkin, the narrative’s emphasis is at the same time on Ursula’s rejection of it. Through oppositions,

reversals, inconsistency, self-contradiction, and quarrelling, Birkin’s idea of

“star-equilibrium”as an ideal notion of love is relativized and enriched. Besides, though the term “star-equilibrium”has not been proffered until Women in Love, the idea of “unison through singleness”has been implied in earlier fiction in Lawrence’s exploration of the relationship between lovers. Therefore, in what follows, I aim to examine some of the promising potentials as well as problems inherent in Lawrence’s registering the dynamics of this new dimension of love as they are manifested in his

“star-equilibrium”as an ideal notion of love is relativized and enriched. Besides, though the term “star-equilibrium”has not been proffered until Women in Love, the idea of “unison through singleness”has been implied in earlier fiction in Lawrence’s exploration of the relationship between lovers. Therefore, in what follows, I aim to examine some of the promising potentials as well as problems inherent in Lawrence’s registering the dynamics of this new dimension of love as they are manifested in his