Textual Ethos Studies: Or Locating Ethics (Critical Studies 26)

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TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Textual Ethos Studies–or Locating Ethics Anna Fahraeus

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The Novel, the Social and the Event: An International Ethical Encounter Nancy Glazener

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Execrable Speech: Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Bagatelles pour un Massacre Nicholas Chare

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The Grotesque on Fleshing Out the Subject of Ethics Sara Cohen Shabot

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Playing Ball With God: Breaking the Law in Breaking the Waves Becky McLaughlin

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Post-textual Ethics: Foucault’s Rhetorical Will Stuart J. Murray

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Shakespeare’s Othello: Jealousy and Hermeneutics Michal Pawel Markowski

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The Ethics of Modality in Pauline Smith’s The Sisters Myrtle Hooper

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Telling Stories: Alterity and Ethics in John Banville’s The Untouchable and Shroud Pietra Palazzolo

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“All this tractate is but a dream”: The Ethics of Dream Narration in Thomas Nashe’s The Terrors of the Night Per Sivefors

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Reading Kristeva and Beyond: Psychoanalysis As Textual Ethics Linda Belau

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Bodily Formations and Reading Strategies in John Donne’s Metempsychosis Siobhán Collins

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Checkpoint Syndrome: Violence, Madness, and Ethics in the Hebrew Literature of the Intifada Adia Mendelson-Maoz

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The Uses and Abuses of Children: Fairy Tales and the Pornographic Victoria Best

229

Representations of Rape in Apartheid and Post-apartheid South African Literature Anne Reef

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Nightwood and the Limits of Representation AnnKatrin Jonsson

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David Mamet’s Altered Ethics: Finding Forgiveness or Something Like It, in House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, and State and Main Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack

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“Your otherness is perfect as my death”: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Li-Young Lee’s Poetry Zhou Xiaojing

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The Look of Ethics: Emmanuel Levinas, Léo Bronstein, and the Interhuman Intrigue Chris Thompson

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A Mind Poised Between Desires: The Ethos of T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Criticism David Watson

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Sentimentality in Postmodernist Fiction: From Ethical Problem to Ethical Possibility Jakob Winnberg

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Notes on the contributors

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Index

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INTRODUCTION TEXTUAL ETHOS STUDIES—OR LOCATING ETHICS ANNA FAHRAEUS

In August 2003 I attended the first bi-annual conference of the British Shakespeare Association in Leicester, England. It had attracted the foremost European scholars and many international names in Shakespeare Studies and the sessions were well-attended and lively. Yet, while participating in the seminar on Cultural Exchange I had the strong sense that several people present were resistant or expected a different focus to the discussion than the panel members—a focus that they opposed. The discussion was harnessed on deck and never seemed to really get off the ground. Whereas we, the panel members, came prepared to discuss the ethos of Shakespeare’s texts in light of new ethical perspectives, there seemed to be a more or less general assumption that what we wanted was to focus on the ethicality of the texts or to deal with the relationship of morality to the texts. The confusion that resulted led to a desire on my part to define my own position on literature and ethics and to consider, on a more general level, what the attitudes of different researchers are in relation to distinguishing an interest in ethics and texts that focuses on ethos from one that focuses on ethicality. The different perspectives on ethics that are present in texts are both worth exploring and important to try to understand, and it is not surprising that the concern with ethics is receiving renewed force in discussions of representation, especially in relation to gender and ethnicity, in an academic environment that has shown itself more than willing to engage with political issues on varied fronts. The focus on textual ethics can be seen in particular in the growing concern with the links between material and discursive forms of repression and usurpation. Ethics is recognized as deeply embedded in discussions of power, of voice and agency, and in textual concerns with the effects of presence and absence, as well as aporias—points at which a final interpretation is foreclosed in a text. As a field, modern ethical criticism is defined as this explicit concern with the relationship between ethics and texts. Critics interested in this relation usually focus on one of four things— and sometimes on more than one of the four at the same time: the overall ethics of reading; the ethics of writing; on how a text promotes or contributes to a positive ethics; and/or on how ethics is operative in the text. In this

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collection, our aim is specifically to highlight the fourth concern within ethical criticism because it is often obscured in theoretical discussions, which tend to focus either on meta-critical concerns or positive ethical value in relation to texts.1 This fourth current can usefully be defined as a concern with the operational ethos of texts because the emphasis is on the peculiarities of the text as much as on how it participates in the production or reproduction of a specific ethical universe. There is a basic recognition that a text’s ethos can be multiple and/or contradictory, and that in texts ethos is—in at least one of its incarnations—invariably textual. In this collection, even those essays that focus on the ethics of criticism or writing, or on positive ethical value in texts they have chosen, emphasize how the ethos position(s) in their texts are specifically represented. A second aim with this collection is to emphasize the inclusiveness of ethical criticism with reference to type of texts and to their ethics. The idea has been that it is not only the different but the heterogeneous qualities— including the negative, questionable, non-realistic and non-rational—that are available in literature, and in texts more generally, that make many of them significant as objects of critical study. In reading about ethical criticism and the relationship of ethics to texts it is easy to come away with the impression that somehow what is being sought after or produced—at least in relation to literature—has to be, or ought to be, positive. Whether it is to assume and focus on the morally educative power of the aesthetic specifically or that the emphasis is placed on cultural texts that can be seen as, to at least some extent, participating in ethical discourse, i.e. in the promotion of a positive ethics, the opening statement in Aristotle’s Nicomachaen Ethics seems to implicitly permeate the theoretical landscape. His work seems to have posited the baseline for what ought to be studied and how texts should be discussed (or read) both in the Anglo-American and in the continental tradition of ethical criticism: “Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good; and so the good has been aptly described as that at which everything aims” (2000: 3). This presupposition of the desirability of a positive value in the relationship between a study of literature and ethics can be seen in, for example, Wayne C. Booth’s focus on “good literature” and Martha Nussbaum’s project of bringing novels into moral philosophy with the purpose of searching in them for a viable ethics.2 1

The term “text” in relation to this collection is broadly defined as a narrated unit, as a text is not an objective description, but represents a series of linguistic and structural choices in the construction of an account. This is as true whether the text is nonfictional or fictional. 2 Cf. Booth, 1988, and Nussbaum, 1990.

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Positive value is also frequently tied to the ethics of reading. In his book Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas, Robert Eaglestone, for example, frames his discussion of ethical criticism within the larger debate on what the objective of criticism should be. He asks the pertinent question, “Does criticism, a strange form of ‘inquiring, learning, knowing and reasoning’, have ethical obligations?” (1997: 1).3 Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s book Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society likewise places criticism itself under the magnifying glass in relation to ethics. Debating how to achieve and write criticism that is ethically sound is important and the objective of this collection is not to undermine that—in fact, there are essays in the collection that share this concern (cf. Belau, Chare). Yet, it is important to state that the concern with the ethicality of interpretation is a meta-critical concern, and for many critics, it can be seen as a second-level concern in the relationship between ethics and texts. It can, therefore, unfortunately result in an over-emphasis—particularly in relation to literary texts—on the critic’s relation to the text and derail, or more or less overshadow, the analysis of the ethics in/of the text itself. I say that this is unfortunate because such analyses are often based on attitudes that are, in themselves, more or less unexamined value judgments about the text. In connection with this it is illuminating and disturbing to look at the three arguments Harpham accounts for with regards to the relationship between ethics and literature. The first he terms the defense of the “apologists for literature” who state that ethics “represents a hidden essence of literature;” the second is the idea that literature is resistant to the “rationality, regularity, universality, obligation” of ethics; and the third that “literature actually exposes the shadowed, chiaroscuro character of ethics itself” and that it cultivates “a generous and humane respect for life in all its strivings and imperfection [...] literature tries, it is said, to develop an ethic more ethical than ethics” (1999: ix-x, emphasis in original). These three arguments are all equally disturbing in so far as they remain unexamined in a given instance of reading. Is literature, and the text under study, given a preeminent standing as inherently ethical? Is literature—and thus any given literary text—interpreted as somehow outside the realm of ethics? Though placing literary texts outside the realm of ethics seems altogether an outdated 3

Eaglestone discusses the tensions in ethical criticism within the larger framework of the anti-theory debate and the uncertainty which characterizes “the academic discipline which teaches criticism: Literary Studies, English, English Studies, Literary Criticism.” He sees ethics as having been central to the inception of criticism but that those conceptions of ethical belief have disappeared in the wake of modernist and postmodernist theory. He looks at the theories of criticism put forth by F. R. Leavis, René Wellek and Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Geoffrey Hartman.

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Romantic relation to the aesthetic, the question of whether a text can be interpreted as being outside an implied or given ethic is open, as is the question of its relationship to a constructive inter-human ethic. In different ways, all three of these questions are addressed to varying degrees in each of the following essays. The dual aim for this collection from the beginning has been to promote the desirability of defining what is meant by ethics in each act of interpretation and to not circumscribe the discussion to texts that necessarily have a positive or straightforward relationship to ethics. Each essay in this volume thus attempts to look for the ethos of a specific text or texts, and many of them have deliberately chosen to focus on atypical texts in relation to ethics. The aim of each essay, however, remains the same: to interrogate the ethics of the piece(s) under consideration and to not accept prima facie statements of its ethical value or its relationship to ethics. Nancy Glazener’s essay opens the collection proper with a look at the textual affiliations between the two critical traditions in ethical criticism: the Anglo-American tradition through Martha Nussbaum, and the continental tradition through Alain Badiou. Glazener sums up the oft-repeated counteraccusations between these two strands as “epistemological naivety and uninterrogated liberalism” on the part of the Anglo-American critics and “obscurantism” and relativism or “the slippery role of practice” on the part of the continental critics. In response, Glazener focuses her discussion on the ethics of the texts produced by two representative theorists. She demonstrates that it is possible to argue for points of contact between the two strands of ethical criticism. She does this, in part, by emphasizing the necessity of sidestepping critical prejudice and remaining open to the idea that “even those working within the privileged metaphors of the Enlightenment, grapple with the limits of the figures and concepts they have inherited.” In reading Nussbaum’s critique of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, Glazener differentiates between “ethical worldview” and “ethical stance” indicating the multiple levels on which ethics operates in Nussbaum’s text and the unexpected gap that exists between these levels. Glazener views Nussbaum’s text as both propounding a normative view of the characters, of the past in James’ novel and as open to—in fact actively searching out—knowledge or awareness that disrupts that same continuity.

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A ‘Center-’less Ethic or Postmodern Responsibility If both the Anglo-American or analytic tradition and the continental tradition are exponents within one field, ethical criticism, can a generalized differentiation be made between traditional ethical criticism and late 20thearly 21st century ethical criticism that encompasses them both? I would say that it can. It is not a reliance on French or continental philosophy nor is it an issue of finding ethical value in texts nor of responsibility—neither the desire to assign it nor assume it. The legacy of an older tradition remains in the desire to deal with the ethics of the text and with responsibility. What seems to be the main difference is the issue of a center for ethics, of whether or not a core value system is assumed. What characterizes postmodern ethical criticism is a center-lessness but this is wrongly interpreted if it is equated with an absolute relativism. There is a strong recognition that while there is no longer one universally accepted or unilaterally taught ethics in the West, there is a demand and a need for ethics that invokes both a sense of duty and obligation. One truth in this case does not cancel out the other. Both exist together. The critical extension of this recognition is that in lieu of adopting an understood shared ethic, there is a focused attention on specificity and contingency in discussing the relationship of ethics to a text. This need is increasingly recognized by both the Anglo-American and the continental tradition in ethical criticism. Two cases in point are Michael Weston’s Philosophy, Literature and the Human Good (2001), and David S. Cunningham’s Reading is Believing: The Christian Faith through Literature and Film (2002). Though Weston’s study is written from varying philosophical perspectives, and Cunningham’s is written from a Christian perspective, both critics pay strict attention to defining the ethical framework in which they are operating. Weston’s work is aimed at seeking a rapprochement between the two traditions in ethical criticism and looking at their common interest in defining the “good life.” Cunningham’s analyses are written within the framework of Catholic theology. He carefully defines and makes the Apostles’ Creed an explicit part of his discussion in relation to literature and filmic texts as he looks at how different works highlight the nature of faith. He defines the concepts and terms he uses instead of assuming an understanding of them based on a shared cultural heritage on the part of his reader. Both Weston and Cunningham, however, also posit positive ethical value as the objective behind their interest in the texts or approaches they interrogate. This collection departs from that as a necessary qualification for an interest in a text’s relationship to ethics. That said, it does not veer away from the question that the methodologies used by Cunningham and Weston

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implicitly underscore and that the concern for ethics in relation to texts has brought back into focus: the importance of the critic’s position and thus his or her relationship to their text and an interpretation of it. This issue can be seen as having arisen as an extension of the discussion of the relationship of the author to a non-critical text, fiction or non-fiction. It is most frequently tied to responsibility. Yet the assumption of a writer’s responsibility for his text assumes that he has full control over it. Without advocating a complete disavowal of responsibility for the writers under discussion, the aim of this collection is to showcase approaches that pay attention to the potential violence and the productive aspect of interpretation as well as the implied or direct prejudices of the text. It is commonly recognized that intentions themselves can be subconscious or conscious but ambivalent, and intended representations can be contaminated by expectations of a text’s future response. Life would be easier if morally corrupt or unethical texts (texts that are racist, sexist, exploitative) were always easily discernible and always consistent. It would also be easier if some ethically powerful texts were more straightforward. Unfortunately, or fortunately, texts are multi-layered in meaning through the nature of language, and many are furthered complicated through choices made by the author with regard to, for example, structure, perspective and narrative persona(e). The distasteful or morally corrupt, however, is not outside the purview of ethics even if it is the negative side of ethics. To argue that a text is unethical or morally corrupt and make it the object of a critique raises ethical issues of complicity as it contributes to its dissemination, but ignoring texts that are considered unethical also has ethical implications. Non-action is itself an action. The relative neutrality of this framing of the author and his or her text is thus not motivated by the dubious desirability of promoting the misconstruction of postmodern morality that Zygmunt Bauman refers to in his Postmodern Ethics: What has come to be associated with the notion of the postmodern approach to morality is all too often the celebration of the ‘demise of the ethical’, of the substitution of aesthetics for ethics, and of the ‘ultimate emancipation’ that follows. Ethics itself is denigrated or derided as one of the typically modern constraints now broken and destined for the dustbin of history. (1993: 2)

In both a general and a specific sense—in this context as relating to the responsibility of the author for his/her text—this volume looks towards a reconceptualization of the basis for an understanding of ethics. Bauman suggests that the key is, to some extent, balance:

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[...] the novelty of the postmodern approach to ethics consists first and foremost not in the abandoning of characteristically modern moral concerns, but in the rejection of the typically modern ways of going about its moral problems (that is, responding to moral challenges with coercive normative regulation in political practice, and the philosophical search for absolutes, universals and foundations in theory). (1993: 4, emphasis added)

If normative regulation and the search for absolutes characterize the modern approach to moral problems, what does the rejection of these approaches amount to? As Bauman’s work stresses the concern with ethics remains. It has, however, become reconceptualized as a field of study, which is to say that its object has been reformulated. A major recognition in this reformulation is the idea of cooperation—or complicity in the creation and dissemination of meaning. Dealing with what a text means and how it does what it does (to make a given interpretation plausible) has thus become about acknowledging the balance in responsibility as a critic between one’s own role and that of the text and its author. One view of this is expressed by Jacques Rancière, who stresses this idea of shared responsibility when he explains why the “educative value” of an aesthetic work is not straightforward. The work lacks the autonomy to serve as “educator” on its own. Instead the autonomy resides in the “mode of experience” itself, which is to say that it resides in the encounter between subject and aesthetic object; an encounter wherein the subject too loses “a certain autonomy” to the heterogeneity of the aesthetic experience (2002: 2). It is in allowing this to occur, in attempting to see the text outside one’s own idea of what it should or ought to say according to a specific theoretical model, that presents the challenge to the critic. This designates any value to be gained from reading as process not a finished product to be discovered; a process which is not wholly in the control of the object (or its creator) or the subject. Rancière posits that it is the multi-temporality of the process of, for example, reading—his argument is not limited to text aesthetics—that makes heterogeneity salvageable from art. The temporal and local nature of the process is the reason behind the differentiation of ethos as the object of study that this collection aims to illustrate. None of the essays present a discussion of texts in relation to a generalized ethics. The production of ethos—as a position or manner of relating to the world in terms of an ethics—occurs in the encounter with the text. This means that the ethos of a text is not seen as (wholly) autonomously present and extractable without the subject but as heterogeneously produced in the temporal process of reading. This, in turn however, does not mean an absolute relativity as the critic too loses

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autonomy in the experience of reading—which is to say that she cannot make it mean anything she wants without straying into unethical territory. In his essay in this collection, Nicholas Chare discusses Julia Kristeva’s use of Céline’s anti-semitic pamphlet, Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937), in her Powers of Horror, and the vehement response it has generated. He specifically points out the contradiction in Jennifer Stone’s negative response to Kristeva’s writing: Stone abjects Powers of Horror, she is inclined to vomit at the writer’s perceived attraction to fascism. She reads with her stomach. This reaction is of note because Kristeva describes abjection—which is characterized by a feeling of disgust—as possessing a moral aspect during the first chapter of Powers of Horror. Stone’s sentiment might be understood as a manifestation of what could be called a ‘visceral ethics’.

Chare does not rest his case on a facile defense of the aesthetic that rejects its political impact, instead he engages the questions raised by Kristeva’s critics. This occasions a return to Kristeva’s use of Céline as well as a discussion of the difficult issue of ascription of responsibility for the meaning of a text. On the one hand, Chare’s essay can be seen as justifying the “permanent quarantine” or censorship of what is perceived or accepted as “morally reprehensible.” He even extends the arguments against Kristeva when he raises the relevant issue of the complicity of the condemnatory essay because it repeats what it is seeking to “to hold to account.” On the other hand, Chare performs an ethos reading of the same pamphlet. He argues that not only is the content ethically questionable but the style of writing is itself representative of a “putrid poetics.” He writes a strong condemnatory essay but confronts this contradiction in his own writing and seeks to interrogate how the process of writing about a text like Céline’s, which is “anti-semitic, fascist, misogynist, and racist,” is to be done and what the effects are of different ways of discussing and referring to it. Kant and the Nature of Knowledge A wider issue that Glazener implicitly touches on is how current ethical criticism almost invariably shares ground with issues explored within earlier philosophical thought, particularly rationalism in the Enlightenment and Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of mind. For ethos readings as analyses of how value is structured in a given text or for a given person or character, Kant’s ideas relating to how we know what we know have a broader impact than his

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moral philosophy; an impact that is perhaps not always recognized as traceable back to Kant. Rationalism, broadly speaking, advocates reason as the source of all knowledge and truth or certainty. René Descartes’ dualistic thought rested on his granting a pre-eminent status to the “rational soul” or mind and relegating the body to an “earthen machine” in gaining knowledge (Zimmer 2005). He began work on a major opus, The World, in which he focused a great deal of attention on the independent capacity of the body, but withdrew it for fear of offending Catholic authorities, and instead published a much shorter work, Discourse on Method, in which he argued for the independent capacity of the soul and his famous thesis, cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am). He proposed that the ability to mentally conceive of perfection presupposed its existence. Not surprisingly, Descartes’ writings are not without their own internal contradictions (cf. Murray). Despite the focus on reason that his work generated, the nature of man as corporeal led to continued discussions on the mind and its relationship to the body. Benedict de Spinoza is one of the philosophers, who picked up the mind-body problem. His discussion of the relationship of mind to matter in Ethics sheds light on the currency of late seventeenth century ideas to the modern debate. It is often stated that like Descartes, Spinoza was a Rationalist and that he devalued sense perception. However, Spinoza’s conceptualization of substance—he believed there is only one— makes it impossible for the mind and the body to be distinct entities, and this marks his theory as definitively different from Descartes’. Thus the statement that he articulates a distinction, between sense or the imaginative perception of the body and intellectual perception, that gives preeminence to the latter, is an oversimplification that dislocates the core of his thought, the monism of substance. The physicality of things and of the self is the problem. It leads to an inseparability of the self from the external object. Spinoza admits that the body contributes to perception and understanding. His complaint is that the body’s perception of things is inadequate and prejudiced: “that the ideas, which we have of external bodies, indicate rather the constitution of our own body than the nature of external bodies” (1997, IIP16C2). To arrive at the intellect’s greater capacity for reliability, he shifts the object of understanding from singular to common things. The adequacy of intellectual perception and human understanding is thus tied in Spinoza to generalities and abstractions. The fact that the body’s knowledge is imperfect is an unavoidable consequence of the limitation placed on the self through the physicality of the body, and uncertainty is thus a condition of mortality. The combination of the two claims in Spinoza, that knowledge gained through the body is unreliable and that the body is

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inseparable from the soul, leads to the logical conclusion that there is an opening in his argument for scepticism. Spinoza himself draws a further conclusion. He rejects free will as a delusion: “[e]xperience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined” (IIIP2S). The clarity of Spinoza’s acknowledgement of the body as a perceiver and transferer of knowledge, albeit imperfect, raises questions as to the precise nature of that knowledge and the manner of its transference. Though less concerned with the relationship of knowledge to the soul or the physical properties of the body, John Locke pursued the question of how knowledge is acquired vigorously in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He argued for the mind as a blank slate at birth and that it progressively gained deeper and deeper impressions as ideas were repeatedly encountered. Though the mind can compare and combine simple ideas into complex ones, it cannot move outside the knowledge gained through experience, whether direct sense experience or through reflection. Locke advocated an acceptance of uncertainty and yet instead of accepting scepticism and revelling in doubt, he proposed the praxis of calculating probabilities: a hypothesis should be erected and followed until it was replaced by something better. What seems like common sense now, changed the intellectual world. As important—or perhaps more importantly from the point of view of the relationship of texts and ethics, Locke contributed through his own methodology and language use to irrevocably secularizing the search for truth and the philosophy of mind. It was in part this secularization that lay behind George Berkeley’s critique of Locke’s Essay. Though an empiricist like Locke, Berkeley was determined to recoup the loss of religious belief and certainty in what he saw as a materialist system (Cooper 259-260). His criticism focused on Locke’s language stating that the arguments were self-contradictory. His objections can be applied to Spinoza’s argument on adequate or reliable understanding as well, because what he was criticizing was the reliance on abstraction and generalities (Berman 5). While Locke argues for primary qualities (e.g. solidity) as inseparable from the object, and secondary qualities (e.g. color) as only imperfectly comprehensible, Berkeley opined that what was true of the secondary properties was equally true of the primary ones. Berkeley argued for the relativity of experience, which is to say that he pointed out that what seems solid to one may be less solid to someone else. Berkeley, however, went so far as to deny the existence of matter. His esse is percipi (to exist is to be perceived) is therefore to be taken literally. For Berkeley, things continue to exist when we do not perceive them because God

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perceives them. Our imperfect comprehension of matter is actually our imperfect comprehension of God’s ideas that he wills us to share, matter is , in itself, irrelevant to explaining how we perceive or comprehend things (Cooper 263). Though he can be difficult to understand for the modern mind, Berkeley’s main point—minus its theological aspect—that there is no existence without perception, by which he means mental acknowledgement and conceptualization, is actually a forerunner to constructivist thought. Kant’s position—transcendental idealism—can be seen as a modified version of Berkeley’s constructivism. Objects are modified and knowledge as well as reality are constructed through the mind. However, there is also a parallel secularized modifaction of Spinoza’s monism, as matter is brought back into play. In Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant argued for the idea that our knowledge is only of impressions—things as they appear to our senses—and not of things as they are in themselves independent of our perception of them (42). This is the epistemological idea that lies behind the modern extended concern that there can exist a self as well as a subject— which is basically the mind’s perception of the self. This issue is reflected in many current readings that focus on identity and subjectivity, and naturally relates to formulations of ethics and the issue of responsibility. The fact that Kant believed both that all knowledge must come through the senses and simultaneously that all knowledge was not necessarily derived from experience has also been important for the development of the philosophy of mind and current discussions on the nature of knowledge (41). The nature of knowledge pertains directly to how we are to understand the structuring of a common ethics. Kant argued that the mode of human perception and reflection might itself have a kind of structure;4 that this mode is a way of organizing information about objects, which in some way influences the way we experience them. This means that the mind is more than a passive recipient of information. It plays an active role in experience. It does not merely register information, it organizes it, interprets it and structures what is experienced through the senses in some way. Knowledge presupposes the mind’s active participation and reception modifies objects in the process. It is in this sense that the mind constructs its object, by bringing a modified version of it into being. Kant makes differentiations in rational knowledge. Basically he defines understanding, which can be gained through analytic judgment, as requiring nothing outside the concept itself to be understood. This is implied in the 4

See particularly “The Architectonic of Pure Reason,” Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd ed. (1787).

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statement “All bodies are extended,” i.e. through their spatial character all bodies connect to other things.5 There is also rational knowledge, which can never be universal or a priori because it is based on synthetic judgments that require sense experience for confirmation (48-49). An issue that this raises is reflected in asking to what extent Kant believed rational knowledge to be an unconscious structuring as opposed to a process of conscious reasoning. In “The Architectonic of Pure Reason,” for example, Kant writes: It is unfortunate that only after we have spent much time in the collection of materials in somewhat random fashion at the suggestion of an idea lying hidden in our minds, and after we have, indeed, over a long period assembled the materials in a merely technical manner, does it first become possible for us to discern the idea in a clearer light, and to devise a whole architectonically in accordance with the ends of reason. (655, italics added)

Here he seems to say that there is a process that occurs outside conscious thought that enables us to structure things and comprehend how they fit together. It suggests an opening for the involvement of the senses, and their connection to knowledge is very much a part of the current discussions relating to ethics and has been evident in literature since the Romantics even though it fell into disrepute in theoretical discussions and has remained so until fairly recently. The role of the body relative to knowledge and the construction of ethos or dispositions related to subjectivity and identity as well as responsibility to the other, is a central issue in trauma theory and in ethics generally. It is not only a matter of being embodied; it is about the role of the mind relative to the body and our senses. The body is not only an object of knowledge but a producer of knowledge. Sara Cohen Shabot’s essay focuses on the role of the body in the creation of subjectivity and in identification, or the creation of identity. She discusses how the body’s basic inescapability and its ultimately exceeding nature deny complete assimilation within absolute systems and compels the reformulation of knowledge. Her concern is with the body’s representation— both actual and its metaphoric properties—and how the body’s representation impacts on understandings of the aesthetic and by extension on the relationship of aesthetics in general to ethics. She focuses specifically on how the properties of the body can be seen as providing a means to envision a 5

Wittgenstein uses the same idea generalized in the Tractatus: “Just as we cannot think of spatial objects at all apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connexion with other things” (2.0121).

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constructive ethics or “grotesque philosophy” of intersubjectivity that can generate a new epistemology. Becky McLaughlin’s reading of Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves starts with the physical, bodily reaction of her students to the film. It makes them sea-sick. Using psychoanalytical theory she begins by asking why this is the case and what response their reliance on their strong physical reaction to the film may be masking. It becomes apparent that their physical response has a counterpart in the film, in which Bess’ body becomes a graphic cipher of her ethical stance toward life. McLaughlin argues that the disjunctive form of the film is tied to its narrated content but also inextricably to the parallel form of Bess’ body and the context of its violation. The film communicates through its physical forms, and through the physical reaction it engenders in the audience. Agency and Non-sense Kant’s conclusion that some of the properties that we ascribe to objects may actually have more to do with the person doing the perceiving than with the objects themselves, seems self-evident now and is a primary concern in metacriticism, or the concern with the role of the critic in the production of interpretations. Its relevance to ethical criticism is apparent in the concern with the ethics of reading (interpreting) and writing. The failure of transcendental metaphysics to achieve certainty did not mean for Kant, however, that nothing transcends the capacity of reason to understand it. There are things reason does not comprehend. This has implications when you consider that he saw human will as, in part, a non-sensible object.6 The preface to the first edition of Critique of Pure Reason actually begins with the sentence, “Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions, which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all

6

In the section entitled “The Ultimate End of Pure Reason” in The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant differentiates between a will that is “purely animal” and “free will” stating that the latter’s “freedom can be proved through experience.” In fact, Kant argues that reason is what gives us “the power to overcome the impressions on our faculty of sensuous desire.” He specifically cites the ability to call up “representations” that convince us to act in certain ways (633).

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its powers, it is also not able to answer” (42). The idea of the will as a partially non-sensible and therefore to some degree incomprehensible part of being human has returned within the concern for ethics in relation to subjectivity and also with texts. It relates very much to the issue of autonomy and thus to responsibility. Kant’s proposition that the will is not something we can fully know has within it an unfinished aspect, an indefinite-ness. This is disturbing because ethics is a matter of the choices we make in how we relate to ourselves and others, and this is very much related to will, to agency. This discomfiting thought of the possibility that we might not consciously control all our choices brings us back to issues and texts that disturb or disrupt somehow. Stuart J. Murray’s essay pushes the examination of Descartes’s concept of will to its textual limit, relates it to Foucault’s model of ethics in which the will “ultimately unseats our comfortable subjectivity,” and envisions through the affinities between their work the conceptualization of a new ethics. Murray looks at the relationship of will to the mind but also to the body in Descartes’ writing. He draws the conclusion that it is in Descartes that the will becomes problematized and ceases to be either alignable solely with the body and the irrational or with the mind and rational. He discusses the body as operated in part by a will that lies outside conscious control. Michal Pawel Markowski’s essay reforms Descartes’ discussion of the will and its relationship to reason in relation to Othello and the inevitably thwarted will to fully comprehend the other and the resultant mad jealousy that ensues from this failure. Markowski moves in his discussion between Shakespeare’s tragedy and the Western hermeneutic legacy. He questions whether it is not time to reevaluate the negative attitude and dismissal of jealousy and the physical manifestations of its affect, and instead begin to take seriously its value as signifying the epistemological brink—or break—at which it is impossible to deny the contingency of human existence. Wittgenstein and Language The turn to language basically occurred after Ludwig Wittgenstein. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), he dealt with the problem raised by Kant: the excess reality that lies outside the grasp of human reason. This idea of excess is not an evaluative designation of something superfluous that

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exceeds the bounds of the normal or the sufficient. Rather, in this context excess is simply that which exceeds full stop; it is a surplus. Wittgenstein argued that language in its logic shows the limit of thought. This meant that what can be thought can be said, but also importantly that what cannot be thought cannot be said (2002: esp. 3.13). Hence, Wittgenstein accused metaphysicians of asserting that language reflects reality in a clearer way than is logically or empirically possible. Wittgenstein did not turn away from the fact that the word and what it corresponds to is not an inevitable relationship—since there exist realities to which there are no corresponding words. This lack of causality has disturbing consequences for his discipline. In Tractatus proposition 5.641, he states: “The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world—not a part of it.” This “philosophical self” is the collective self or what is normally referred to as man or the subject. The “limit of the world” is the equivalent of what there is to know about humankind and the metaphorical universe we live in. Wittgenstein’s argument is that being able to talk about “a part of it”—a part of what it means to be human and about the world7 we live in—is not enough for the philosopher, and to do so creates an illusion, a self-deception of knowing more than can be known.8 It is to attempt to describe what lies outside reason’s ability to describe. A form this excess can take is mood or modality. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has defined ethos usefully in its relation to an intersubjective ethics as specifically “a modality of being” or “manner” that comes to be assumed and appropriated as part of an identity (Agamben 1993: 28, 22). For Agamben, ethos does not exist as a transcendental, stable entity outside intersubjectivity, but is defined in human relations by the “how” rather than as a pre-existing what. This shift in conceptualizing ethos highlights it as performative, and as a process, its homogeneity—especially over time—becomes suspect. This way of reading ethos can be used, of course, in looking at persons and cultures as well as looking at characters in fictional works, but it also relates to Aristotle’s definition of ethos as the appeal related to ethics in the language and style used by the speaker. 7

Wittgenstein states clearly “That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world.” (Wittgenstein’s emphases, 5.62, 151.) 8 Wittgenstein would later attempt to resolve the contradiction of the aims and the limits of philosophy in Philosophical Investigations, 1953. What is important here, however, is that the questions he raised in the Tractatus are still current in spite of his later work.

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Agamben’s focus on manner is similar to Aristotle’s definition of ethos as something that is constructed on a technical level and that is reflected through a mode or manner of speaking. As a category of logic modality is the classification of a rhetorical strategy or linguistic unit on the basis of whether it asserts or denies the possibility, impossibility, contingency, or necessity of its semantic content. It is commonly accepted that the semantic content of a statement can say one thing while the excess modality of its expression says something else entirely or adds a surplus. Irony is a mood. Sarcasm is a mood. Mood and modality in all its different forms affects the interpretation of ethos and can be the focus of an ethos reading. It is thus possible to see modality as a secondary level within the text that can have a separate ethos from that of the characters or the events. This has been widely known and commonly accepted in literary studies for a long time. The crux for modern ethical criticism is the application of modality to non-fictional texts and that it has equal validity in the political reading of fictional texts. This is Booth’s point in his discussion of his colleague’s averse reaction to having Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on the required reading for his class. Modality is an excess that complicates a reading of ethics in or of a narrative as a story and as a single act of narration. While all the essays in this collection focus on discursive strategies or effects in texts, two essays deal directly with modality as choice as the focus of their analyses. Myrtle Hooper’s focus is linguistic. In literary analysis the concern in regards to language is often with semantics or connotation, but Hooper argues for a basis in understanding the import of language as inscribed by modal verbs—which are related to the classifications of logic as designating possibility, probability, contingency, necessity etc. She sees specific linguistic choices as constitutive of an ethics—or rather an opening to a constructive ethics. Implicit in her essay is the theoretical work of the postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha. His theory of Third Space relates directly to her argument as it points to how human interaction—including language—acts to displace the histories that constitute that interaction, sets up new structures of authority and enables new political initiatives, in part because human interaction can require or give unexpected impetus to new modes of thinking. It is this type of development—though she does not use Bhabha—that Hooper sees traces of in Smith’s “The Sisters.” In her essay, Pietra Palazzolo looks at the act of narration and the voices in John Banville’s The Untouchable and Shroud in relation to responsibility and how the complexity of this issue is heightened by the fact that the novels are fictive representations of actual historical events. Her stated object of focus is the modalities of Banville’s recasting of two actual events. She is not

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interested in their faithfulness but in how the narrative choices pertain to the issues of alterity and ethics. She argues for the texts as interventions in ethics that are “manifested at several levels: visual, linguistic, socio-cultural, political, historical.” Her reading has a Levinasian cant in that she argues for the centrality of language to an understanding of alterity. Language and Derrida Derrida’s influence is widespread in literary studies in general and is markedly evident in ethical criticism—either implicitly in analyses or as an object of critique. The type of reading associated with Derrida is usually referred to as deconstruction but has also been described usefully as a “working through (or in, or with, anything but a deconstruction of)” the text (Jackson 2001: 36). Jackson’s desire to distance himself and his reading from deconstruction can be seen as a result of the negative connotations associated with the term; the idea that deconstructive analyses rip texts apart and neither find nor leave anything useful behind. This is paradoxical because Derrida is interested in essences—though they remain elusively out of reach (cf. Belau’s discussion of the “kernel”). It is the impossibility in describing the essential nature of anything that runs through his work, making it about the process of getting there—without ever arriving, but this does not negate that there is a there in the first place. This can be seen in the link that Jackson makes between his own position and John D. Caputo’s claim that Derrida’s interests are not about the event, for example, of revelation “but rather in a philosophical structure or possibility that underlies this event” (1997: 194). Derrida is most frequently associated with his term différance, which entails both difference and deferral in the relationship between a sign and the object it signifies. Definitive meaning is continually postponed. What makes Per Sivefors’ essay stand out in this collection is that his interpretation of Thomas Nashe’s “All this tractate is but a dream” presents it as an early modern text that maintains a face-to-face relation to two opposing Others. Nashe’s tract deals with a topic that is ethically neutral to the modern Western mind, the nature of dreams. The topic was, however, not ethically neutral to the early modern mind, and Sivefors uses Nashe’s pamphlet on nightmares as an opening to explore how a text can function as a reflection on or arena for strongly competing values. Sivefors addresses how Nashe’s rhetorical strategies can be seen as contributing to an interrogation of the different value systems if a final definitive meaning in the text is allowed to remain deferred.

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Negativity and the Realization of Ethics To stop at the concept of différance and the deferral of meaning is to misread Derrida in relation to ethics. His texts do not support an absolute relativism. Despite his theory about the nature of language, his writing does not indicate an acceptance of relativity that nullifies the idea of the existence of ethics, but encourages the recognition that irreducible paradoxes—what he refers to as “aporias,” a word taken from the Greek system of logic—demand the assumption of personal responsibility, of personal decisions in the act of reading. In Against Ethics (1993), Caputo provides a Derridean formulation of the nature of our relationship to ethics as always more or less complicit but as nevertheless necessary. Despite its provocative title, Caputo’s book is a brilliant reading of Derrida’s writing as based on an existentialist philosophy with all that this implies of both anxiety and responsibility in the face of the freedom to choose.9 This opening for an active ethics can be seen in Derrida’s explication of his own position: One could multiply the examples of this double duty [presented by aporias]. [...] It would be necessary to recognize both the typical or recurring form and the inexhaustible singularization—without which there will never be any event, decision, responsibility, ethics, or politics. These conditions can only take a negative form (without X there would not be Y). One can be certain only of this negative form. As soon as it is converted into positive certainty (‘on this condition, there will surely have been event, decision, responsibility, ethics, or politics’), one can be sure that one is beginning to be deceived, indeed beginning to deceive the other. (Aporias 1993: 20, emphasis added) .

The deception of both the self and the other takes place because an assertion of knowledge is inevitably a reduction. By their nature aporias “exceed” the singular response and thus the taking of any decision will lead to “error, recklessness, the unthought, and irreponsibility,” which then appear as the “very presentable face of good conscience” (1993: 20). However, the fact that for Derrida, making a decision or being responsible is irreducibly tied to irresponsibility does not negate the necessity of answering the call to duty. In fact, the existence of irreducible contradictions or aporias, in for example a text, is itself such a call. Derrida is not a moral deontologist (which is to say that he does not believe in universal principles of right and wrong) but nor is he an advocate for an absolute relativist position in practice. Derridean readings work with the idea of how a 9

Caputo comes out for ethics or what he calls “quasi-ethics” but against ethics as designatable articles of faith.

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text opens itself to different interpretations by composing and decomposing itself, and in this way requiring the reader to make an active responsible choice—or to state why this is not possible or preferable. The “undecidability” itself “demands decision” and is itself the constituting force of the ethical in Derrida (Kronick 1999: 39).10 Derrida deals with this by emphasizing that “event[s], decision[s], responsibility, ethics or politics” are “conditions” that “can only take a negative form.” Thus any position taken must be phrased as a negative. Two essays in this collection deal specifically with approaches in texts that manifest a Derridean choice of actively not choosing. Linda Belau discusses Julia Kristeva’s writing on melancholy and abjection and focuses on ethics as a need that only the negative can fill. She formulates a psychoanalytical view of Kristeva’s writing as a textual practice with a strong implicit ethos. Belau argues that the writing itself foregrounds that “[i]t is precisely the function of the negative that grounds ethics and annuls the emergence of the pathological.” She illustrates how the approach Kristeva uses can be seen as marked by its own failure and “a necessary repetition around a missing kernel,” a kernel that must remain missing in order for ethics not to deteriorate into a reductive conformity. Belau stresses that, at the same time, Kristeva’s writing reinforces that the striving towards an ethics is equally important and must remain in order for the negativity not to become perversion. The active choice to not choose can also be the adoption of a specific critical strategy that actively strives to identify the multiplicity of meaning, uncertainties and apparent inconsistencies as not by necessity nullifying—or indicating failure—but instead as contributing to a complex picture of the value system or ethic espoused by the text. In her essay, Siobhán Collins rejects the relative consensus among the critics that John Donne’s Metempsychosis is incoherent and a failed poem, and finds instead openings within the text to see it as his “most extended poetic exploration of metaphysics.” She argues for textual evidence within the poem for a dual and ambivalent ethos that forestalls a final resolution between the spiritual and the physical/sexual but also forestalls a “collapse into a sceptical and extreme relativism.” The end result, Collins posits, is an invitation to “wonder” with Donne, to contemplate the relationship of body and soul without a guaranteed or a presupposed outcome.

10

The quotes within the quote are taken from Derrida, 1981: 220 and 1988: 116.

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Violence The issue of responsibility in relation to representation—and indeed signification—is inextricably tied to the issue of violence. The idea of text and reader as separate and uncontaminated entities in the process of reading is an illusion. Any literary criticism that applies theory to a text as a method of speaking for the object of study subscribes to an ontological practice that is violent in its basic premise of separateness, which amounts to an assumption that influence or power can be unilateral; the claim to understanding a text or another person is a form of power.11 Instead, the aim should be to maintain a face-to-face relation with the text that does not absorb it into a theoretical framework but lets its excess be there and complicate the reading.12 This idea of an invitation is recurrent in postmodern ethics (cf. Winnberg). It has a dark aspect, however. How is the invitation posed by the violent Other to be approached (cf. Thompson)? Levinas seems to say that s/he cannot be denied. This collection is aimed at accepting the challenge that, as part of the construction of a modern ethics of human relations, a faceto-face with the violence in society is required. The point is not to excuse or condone violence, but to refuse it the power of the monolithic and of the radical nature of the absolute other. Levinas’ position too appears more to be about the impossibility of evading the existence of violence in all human interactions, and the importance of interrogating it rather than denying its existence. The idealization of the other is, for Levinas, an abdication of responsibility that is as violent in its own way as the idealization of the self— which creates a violent hubris. Though all of the readings in this collection perform readings on the intersection between the aesthetic and ethics, they do so with material that varies in the degree of its connection to actual cultural phenomena or historical realities and to the intensity of the response the texts generate. Three essays in particular stand out for their treatment of social material that is very politically sensitive and highly controversial. Adia Mendelson-Maoz’s essay is concerned with the current Israeli politics of the Occupied Territories. She discusses the ethos presented by a trend in Israeli poetry and its representation of the effects of working in the occupied territories. Her focus is on specific poets and their work and its rawness, on the perpetrator as victim of his own violence, and on how this

11 For a very brief but thought-provoking overview of what Levinas has meant for criticism in general, see Frederick Young, 2002. 12 Cf. The “surplus” of the other in Jill Robbins, 1999.

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type of poetry, as a part of Israeli culture, both reflects and reflects on Israeli society. Against the backdrop of a general discussion of the representation of sexualized children, Victoria Best compares and contrasts Nicolas JonesGorlin’s Rose Bon-Bon (2002) and Jean-Pierre Enard’s Contes à faire rougir d’honte les petits chaperons (1987). She also looks at the reception of the two works in France. What is of special interest to Best is the similarity of basic content (sexualized children) and yet the radically opposed response the two novels have attracted because of their difference in form, and the relevance of this discrepancy to an understanding of modern ethics in relation to children and to how they are represented. Anne Reef’s essay looks at rape in South African literature against the backdrop of the extraordinarily high incidence of rape in South Africa. Reef’s aim is not to arrive at a definitive stance that should be adopted but instead to discuss the complexity of the issues involved in relation to the issue itself and its representation, e.g. the dual bind that silence imposes on rape survivors, the issue of gender and writing, race and perpetrators and their victims, and the responsibility of interpretation. From the Human Other to Language as Other: Levinas There are many introductions to the work of Levinas and many recapitulations of his theories in relation to ethics but one of the most succinct overviews of his contribution is Jill Robbins’ opening paragraph in Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature: Within recent Continental philosophy, Emmanuel Levinas has decisively renewed the question of the ethical. In a manner somewhat analogous to Heidegger’s retrieval of the forgotten question of being, Levinas repeats and revisits an entire philosophical tradition from the vantage point of the forgetting of the ethical. The tradition, he argues, habitually suppresses alterity, subordinating it to the totality. Interpreting the other as a necessary moment of the same, that is, in an all too dialectizable manner, it would reduce the absolutely other to the other of the same. (1999: xiii)

This idea of the other and of the same and the relation between the two occurs in different ways and in different formulations in Levinas’s work. One way of understanding the crucial relevance of his writing on the self and the other towards a reconceptualization of the effects and ethical implications of human interaction is to go through the writings of Bhabha. In his essay “DissemiNation,” Bhabha reflects on the effects of a clash between

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nationalism and national culture in a way that bears a marked resemblance to Levinas’ distinction between Said and Saying. Bhabha designates nationalism as the pedagogical view of culture, “the homogenous and horizontal view associated with the nation’s ‘imagined community’.”13 This pedagogical view is analogous to the Said. He designates “national culture” as the performative view, where culture is produced in the daily acts of individuals (1994b: 145). It is in the performative view of culture that an image of contradiction or difference emerges as daily acts diverge from the expected. This performative view also forms part of the Said. Bhabha asks the question, “how do we understand such forms of social contradiction?” (153). In answer to his own question, he purports that there is “a disjunctive time” or “split” between the two—the pedagogical and performative or the two forms of Said—that creates the conceptual ambivalence or difficulty in pinning down exactly what is meant by a nation’s culture, and that the emergence of this in-between space is creative. It is this space that he calls “the interstices” or “Third Space” and for Bhabha it is an enunciatory space because it “provides the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood— singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity” (1994a:1). Levinas’ Saying is the equivalent—and precursor—of this terrain, this Third Space. In Otherwise than Being, Levinas designates Saying as specifically the site where exposure to the other takes place and as a “no place” or “utopia” (Davis 1996: 76-78). Saying is at the center of ethical relations because it forms the basis for how the subject is constituted through and by the other—and this is one point, where it is useful to not know whether the Other in Levinas’ original text should be translated with neighbor, language, or even God (as in a transcendent will). Bhabha’s theory is helpful to understanding Levinas primarily because it facilitates a concrete understanding of how two instances of Said can differ and how their interaction produces an effect that alters the perception of both. Two originary moments—or subjects—do not meet and make a third but are displaced and ruptured by the clash of their meeting in Bhabha and similarly, two instances of the Said can clash and displace each other exposing or creating a new avenue for thought within a text. It is this productivity that is reflected in Saying. Several readings in this collection focus to varying degrees on Levinas and his reworking of ethics, but each critic that has chosen to look at Levinas or Levinas’ concepts does so for different reasons and in different ways. In 13

Bhabha’s pedagogical aspect of a nation’s culture is comparable to what in Foucault’s terminology is a nation’s dominant discourse or prevailing structures of thinking that permeate all national institutions—public and private.

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her essay, AnnKatrin Jonsson argues that a position on ethics emerges in Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood through a narrational excess that “un-Says” the already Said and thus destabilizes previous representations or images. The narrational excess functions to expose what lies outside the ability of the other characters to know about Robin. In a sense, Jonsson focuses on the irreducible distance between the characters, the gaps that they cannot or fail to fill. The novel is a graphic display of the inevitable failed mastery of the other. In their reading of David Mamet’s work, Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack focus on the term alterity. They suggest that Levinas’s concept of exteriority is necessary to understanding how he uses alterity, and emphasize how Levinasian alterity (as opposed to alternate formulations of this concept) is irreducible to difference and otherness, and is instead a state of being in relation to the other. Alterity is not the other but is produced in me in confrontation with the other. Against this backdrop, Davis and Womack discuss the relational asymmetry and emotional complexity of Mamets’ work. Zhou Xiaojing explores Levinasian alterity as language through the Asian American perspective in Li-Young Lee’s poetry. Zhou looks at alterity’s relation to socially constructed otherness, as well as its effects on the self in the form of the lyric “I” in Lee’s work. In her reading she retains Levinas’s emphasis on language as constitutive: “‘the relation between the same and the other [...] is language [...] primordially enacted as conversation’ (TI, 39). Language reveals the other, the ‘vision’ of the face is inseparable from this offering language is (TI, 174)” (Eaglestone 1997: 121-122).14 In his essay, Chris Thompson focuses on Levinas’ negative attitude to art, an aspect of Levinas’ work that is particularly perplexing and provocative because of the compelling and self-justifying status his philosophy of the self and the other have attained within literary analysis. In his approach, Thompson looks at Levinas’ Totality and Infinity in conjunction with the lesser-known Fragments of Art, Life, and Metaphysics by Léo Bronstein. Both texts, Thompson argues, treat the ethical encounter as fundamentally only conceptualizable in aesthetic terms. Thompson finds in Levinas’ writing, especially on the properties of metaphor, a position on the aesthetic as an illusion, “the experience of which produces forms of sensation that instantiate what lies beyond the terms of the illusion itself.” Both the possibility that identity can be divided into a self and a conscious subjectivity, and the limitations of this thinking subject spread outside philosophy to literature in Modernist writing. Both issues influence readings 14

TI refers to Totality and Infinity.

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of texts related to ethics in very real ways—from feminist readings to ecocriticism to man’s relation to machines and the ethics of the internet. In his book Narrative Ethics (1995) Adam Zachary Newton specifically argues Modernism’s renewed concern with the limits of the self and its knowledge, in light of the then new scientific and biological theories of Darwin and Freud, can be seen in how “formal innovations in the novel dovetail with an increased anxiety about what it means, simply to render oneself, and to affect others, narratively” (1995: 31). Newton makes the case for an ethics of the story-telling arena in which he argues that the act of narration and the act of listening or reading both implicitly engage ethics. He holds that the poems, short stories, and novels of which he offers readings are “built around an armature of intersubjective relations accomplished through story.” The ethical is this relation; it is “narrative as relationship and human connectivity [...] narrative as claim, as risk, as responsibility, as gift, as price. Above all, as an ethics, narrative is performance or act” (1995: 7). Since his focus is on texts “in which a kind of genealogy of [self-conscious] anxiety can be tracked,” which he designates as “novels and short fiction of the mid to late nineteenth century” (31), this impacts on his theory for “an intersubjective paradigm of narrative ethics” (31). Is it possible to broaden his paradigm to include other texts from other time periods? Is it desirable? In any case, Newton engages deconstruction and usefully points out that it is not a monolith, that there are many practices of deconstruction. In his discussion he is mainly concerned with Paul de Man’s formal deconstruction, which he interprets as stopping too soon, as being too cautious and as creating a repeating loop that “plays and replays ad infinitum” (38). It is a valid risk. Though insisting finally that deconstruction and ethics part company, Newton concedes that deconstruction is not characterized by “an indifference to answerability; it is at best a scrupulous hesitation, an extreme case occasioned by the treachery of words and the dangers of easy answers” (7). In this collection, David Watson argues for this type of rhetorical anxiety in relation to the self and the formulation of an ethical theory in T. S. Eliot’s writing: If one aspect of Eliot’s discourse conforms to an understanding of ethics that views it as a self-directed enterprise involving the formation and cultivation of the self, then the other side of it is suggestive of an ethics centered on the relationship between the self and other, in which the self is called on to respond to the unforeseen presence of an other.

Watson argues that central to the dualism in the ethos of Eliot’s writing is an unstable sense of identity, a sense of “rootlessness.” Watson ties the idea of

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how the self is presented in Eliot through rhetorical strategies to Michel Foucault’s theories about how the self must be continually re-constructed as if it is a work of art and with an acceptance that each construction is provisional (cf. Murray). Eliot’s writing becomes not only an avenue towards understanding his critical attitude towards the writing process, but towards conceptualizing subjectivity itself as a process. Cohen Shabot makes the related theoretical point that an understanding of the conceptualization of the subject in a given theory of ethics is important to comprehending that theory. What this often entails is an explicit disentangling of the subject from relevant ideologies—sometimes located in the text, sometimes only extra-textually. Though this occurs more or less across the board in this collection in different ways, two examples stand out: Mendelson-Maoz’s discussion of the ethical complexities involved in representing rape and its survivors in South African fiction, and Best’s discussion of the deceptive relationship of representation to professed ethics in reference to the sexualization of children. In a theoretically-speaking lateral move, Jakob Winnberg argues, in the final essay in this collection, that it is the “the indeterminacy and vacillation” that characterizes the postmodern subject, which effects an opening that may let sentimentality “transcend the self-indulgence and solipsism of the modern ego and reach an intersubjective sphere of engagement with the other.” His essay implicitly addresses how attitudes towards sentimentality have ontological and ethical repercussions and the relevance of this to an examination of the ideologies related to sentimentality in a text versus the ones we (as readers) have adopted. Winnberg performs in part a deconstructive reading of Levinas in order to argue for the equal standing that should be granted to the “sentimental other” and to advocate a move towards a qualified acceptance of the value of sentimentality as essential for the conceptualization of a postmodern ethic of relation as well as of representation. Conclusion The essays in this volume all seek to theorize and articulate differing conceptualizations of the way representation and ethics intersect and complicate each other. The aim of the collection as a whole is specifically to highlight how different aspects of textuality or rhetorical strategies influence ethos and affect readings; and to illustrate the varying perspectives that can be used to localize how texts engage or invite an engagement with ethics. We have also wanted to give prominence to the study of atypical texts that

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represent different attitudes toward the violent, the disordered, the traumatized, the psychotic, and the sentimental in order to encourage—or provoke—further discussion of the relevance of these types of texts to ethics. Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio (1993). The Coming Community, trans. by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P. Aristotle (2000). Nicomachean Ethics, trans. and ed. Roger Crisp, New York: Cambridge UP. Bauman, Zygmunt (1993). Postmodern Ethics, Oxford, UK and Cambridge, USA: Blackwell. Berman, David (1999). Berkeley, New York: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994a). The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. —— (1994b). “DissemiNation,” The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 139-170. Booth, Wayne C. (1988). The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, Berkeley: U of California P. Caputo, John D. (1997). The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion, Bloomington: Indiana UP. —— (1993). Against Ethics: Contributions to A Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction, Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP. Cooper, David E. (1996). World Philosophies, Oxford, Blackwell. Cunningham, David S. (2002). Reading is Believing: The Christian Faith through Literature and Film, Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos P. Davis, Colin (1996). Levinas: An Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press. Derrida, Jacques (1993). Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit, Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. —— (1988). Limited, Inc., Evanston: Northwestern UP. —— (1981). Dissemination, London: Athlone. Descartes, René (1999). Discourse on Method and related writings, trans. Desmond M. Clarke, London, Penguin Books. Eaglestone, Robert (1997). Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt (1999). Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society. Durham and London: Duke UP. Jackson, Ken (2001). “‘One Wish’ or the Possibility of the Impossible: Derrida, the Gift, and God in Timon of Athens,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 52, Issue 1, 43-66.

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Kant, Emmanuel (1973). Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, Palgrave Macmillan [online]. Available from: http://www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Philosophy/Kant/cpr/cpr-open.html [acccessed May 2005]. Kronick, Joseph G. (1999). Derrida and the Future of Literature, Albany, NY: State U of New York. Levinas, Emmanuel (1999). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP. Locke, John (1975). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon P. Newton, Zachary (1995). Narrative Ethics, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP. Nussbaum, Martha (1990). Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, New York: Oxford UP. Rancière, Jacques (2002). “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy,” New Left Review, 14, Mar-Apr., 133-152. Robbins, Jill (1999). Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature, Chicago, Il.: U of Chicago P. Spinoza, Benedict de (1997), The Ethics, part II, trans. R. H. M. Elwes, May, [online]. Available from: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs /etext97/ 2spne10.txt [acccessed May 26, 2005]. —— The Ethics, part III, trans. R. H. M. Elwes, May, [online]. Available from: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/3spne10.txt [acccessed May 26, 2005]. Taylor, Charles (1989). Sources of the Self, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Young, Frederick (2002). “Levinas and Criticism: Ethics in the Impossibility of Criticism,” Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century, ed. Julian Wolfreys, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 238-255. Weston, Michael (2001). Philosophy, Literature and the Human Good, London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2002). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), London and New York: Routledge. Zimmer, Carl (2005). Soul Made Flesh: How the Secrets of the Brain Were Uncovered in Seventeenth-Century England, London: Arrow Books.

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THE NOVEL THE SOCIAL, AND THE EVENT: AN INTERNATIONAL ETHICAL ENCOUNTER NANCY GLAZENER In this essay, Glazener argues that the classic realist novel occupies a zone of contention between Anglo-American and continental traditions in ethical philosophy. Instead of looking for obvious points of contrast, faulting “the Anglo-Americans for their epistemological naivety and uninterrogated liberalism and the continentals for their obscurantism and the slippery role of practice in their work,” she identifies stylistic and epistemological affinities between the two traditions, as embodied in ethical writings by Martha Nussbaum and Alain Badiou. Glazener argues that the difference between the traditions can be seen as a matter of what Foucault has called “doxology,” the study of polemics and opinions, whereas an archeological approach can reveal their epistemic commonalities (Foucault 1973: 200).

I dwell in Possibility— A fairer House than Prose— More numerous of Windows— Superior—for Doors— Emily Dickinson Art is the setting-into-work of truth […]. Art happens as poetry. Martin Heidegger Since the end of the nineteenth century, ‘poetry’ has deliberately maintained the balance between sociality and madness, and we view this as the sign of a new era. Julia Kristeva

It is hard to know precisely which writers Emily Dickinson would have linked to “Possibility” rather than “Prose” (1960: 327), but for Heidegger, Kristeva, and a number of continental thinkers writing in the wake of Nietzsche, the privileged canon of poetry consists of certain nineteenthcentury European poets—Hölderlin and Mallarmé, especially—avant-garde writers from the turn of the century—symbolists and Surrealists—and certain modernists and postmodernists (Heidegger 1993: 202; Kristeva 1984: 215).

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Writings counted as poetry, in this strong sense, have been credited with bold epistemological investigations, ethical and political interrogations that push thinking beyond the constraints of representation, subjectivity, and narrow rationality. This is, for example, the point Kristeva makes in countering “sociality” with “madness.” Poetry and certain kinds of non-realist prose have been held up as the privileged vehicles—privileged even to supplant philosophy, in some accounts—for the most fundamental and urgent inquiries into and beyond the conceptual confines of modernity. The intellectual formation marked here by Heidegger and Kristeva (in spite of their differences) takes literature seriously as a means of thinking, mainly because twentieth-century philosophy and its border disciplines— certain strands of linguistics and psychoanalysis—came to understand language as the volatile, convoluted medium and precondition of thought and subjectivity. This new view of language was made possible only by a radical break with theories of language premised on representation and reference. As the poem by Dickinson indicates, prose in the form of the classic realist novel can easily pass for thinking inside the box—the box of historical inscription, or the box of social reproduction—whereas only poetry or experimental prose that could be treated poetically, in spite of not having left representation utterly behind, might seem porous enough to foster discovery and invention. Not surprisingly, then, classic realist novels occupy a zone of contention within the recent resurgence of interest in ethics and the arts. Within the continental tradition I have sketched, classic realist novels have been of little interest, but the category of ethics and its chief support, the subject, are being adventurously rethought. Within the mainly humanist and Aristotelian branch of the Anglo-American tradition, though, the classic realist novel has long been and still is a mainstay of ethical criticism as well as of the forms of historical and political criticism that have thrived in recent decades by taking up novels as indices of history or engines of social reproduction. As is the case in most of the international plots of Henry James, the distinctions I am making between Europeans and Americans or continentals and AngloAmericans are unstable: after all, there may well be more Heideggereans in the US academy than on the European continent, and the tradition I will call Anglo-American has continental allies (most notably, Jürgen Habermas) and occasionally reveals continental influences. However, the two traditions are distinct though sometimes parallel: the “turn to ethics” in the continental tradition was sparked by Michel Foucault’s last two volumes of The History of Sexuality, published in French in 1984 (1990; 1998), in which Foucault famously shifted his attention from fields of power relations to technologies of the self, and in the Anglo-American tradition an analogous shift can be dated by the publication of key essays by Martha Nussbaum in the early

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1980s, essays later collected in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990). The significant contribution of Nussbaum, an Aristotelian, was not to salvage or redefine ethics. Rather, despite working within an Aristotelian tradition not markedly committed to the epistemological role of language, Nussbaum recommended a mode of philosophical reading that would take literature seriously as a form of ethical reflection. It is easy to contrast the Anglo-American renewal of ethical attention to literature with the continental reconstruction of ethics predicated on poetry as a mode of thinking. After all, not only do the philosophical coordinates of these two intellectual formations diverge; their characteristic styles also clash. On the Anglo-American side are moral earnestness, faithfulness to the obvious but taxing, unflagging attention to forms of responsibility, and the presupposition that civil society and the state both depend upon the thoughtful selflessness of the individual. On the continental side are a love of surprise and paradox, a preference for the unpredictable grasp of the elusive, and the unsettling of categories such as the individual, responsibility, and politics. It would be easy to fault the Anglo-Americans for their epistemological naivety and uninterrogated liberalism and the continentals for their obscurantism and the slippery role of practice in their work. However, I will argue that the difference between these positions may be merely a matter of what Foucault has called “doxology,” the study of polemics and opinions, whereas an “archeology” (which I will sketch in this essay) can reveal the ways in which these are “interlocking and simultaneous forms” of knowledge, sharing an episteme (Foucault 1973: 200). Recognizing this epistemic commonality can help us to gnaw away at an important impasse in our current ethical thinking. In spite of the enshrinement of the social in the Anglo-American tradition represented by Nussbaum and the tendency for the continental tradition to dismiss utterly the institutions and academic disciplines that organize and investigate social life, an effort to find new ways of thinking the social may be at work in both traditions. An important resource for this effort is that most social of literary forms, the classic realist novel. Nussbaum vis à vis Badiou Despite the parallels between Foucault’s and Nussbaum’s renewals of ethics, the continental philosopher that this essay will counterpoise to Nussbaum is Alain Badiou, who has developed an explicitly ethical version of the Heideggerean category of “event.” Like a number of other recent French thinkers, Badiou deploys this term “event” in more or less the spirit of

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Heidegger’s term Ereignis, signaling the surprising and unpredictable potential of thinking to break free of what has been known, a freedom made possible by the fact that thought (or its medium, language)—though not an idealist fantasy—will never coincide with truth: that we will never, once and for all, reach a conclusive knowing, even though we may be seized often by thinking. An event, in this sense, constitutes not a new happening—not a new item in a series already projected—but a new paradigm or the occasion for a new paradigm’s advent, part of thought’s continuing and endless struggle to emerge. Badiou links ethics indissolubly to epistemology, identifying an ethic of truths in the form of fidelity to truth-processes. Rather than locating ethics in codified social behaviors or, as Badiou argues about the advocacy of human rights, in the vulnerability of the human body, Badiou locates ethics in the potential of human beings to think (2001: 18-39). If a situation—a fundamental unit for Badiou, conceptualized according to mathematical set theory and bypassing the distinction between substance and relation (Feltham and Clemens 2003: 8)—is “what there is,” an event is a supplement to the situation in the light of which it can be radically re-thought (2001: 25). Thus, he would replace “‘concern for the other’” with an attention to “hitherto unexplored possibilities for our situation, and ultimately for ourselves” (2001: 33). A human animal exists in a situation; a subject (which might be collective or trans-individual) is formed when an event sets in motion a truthprocess to which the subject is faithful. Its fidelity is its being taken up by, or its inauguration by this truth-process. Thus, the problem of the subject’s agency—the subject’s power to decide and choose, in an act of genuine thinking rather than socialized or determined behavior—is replaced in Badiou’s philosophy by the problem of the emergence of the new, which in this case produces a subject not governed by a common definitional paradigm (Feltham and Clemens 2003: 8). An event contingently and undecidably provides the occasion for the emergence of a subject, who is radically new. The lynchpin of Badiou’s doctrine of the event is the particular way in which its truth-process is precluded from being final or totalizing. The event emerges from the “void” of the earlier situation, rather than from its “plenitude” (2001: 68-71). Indeed, the difference between a truth-process deriving from a void and one deriving from a plenitude is the difference between good and evil, and under the latter heading—that of “simulacrum, or terror”—Badiou includes the Holocaust, which he frames as a dangerous simulacrum based on valorizing a plenitude of the preceding situation: namely, a certain conception of “the German people” understood to be destined for “domination” (2001: 71, 73). In addition to this form of evil, Badiou identifies two others: the betrayal of a truth, in which one denies that

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a truth-process to which one has previously been faithful was ever a truth; and the mistaking of a truth as complete and adequate (2001: 71). If thinking never reaches an end, then the ethic of truths must be faithful to the nature of thinking by never pretending that there has been a last word. The first form of evil, the simulacrum, consolidates the power of a strand or moment in thought, rather than finding the occasion for thinking in the naming of the unthought of a situation; the third form of evil, which is analogous to the first, insists impossibly on the timeless adequacy of a truth. The second form of evil falsifies the history of thinking and its power to form subjects, since a truth which has been exhausted was nonetheless a truth. The ethic of truths, Badiou insists, is “asocial”: the subject of truth, accordingly, does not have socio-economic interests and cannot be characterized, as an ethical being, by their renunciation (2003a: 70; 2001: 54). Here Badiou’s conception, following a position sketched by Nietzsche and pursued especially productively by Foucault, differentiates ethics from the curbing of desire, self-interest, or other vital or expansive tendencies of the individual that are enacted in shared social space. In this way, continental ethics avoids any structure of forbidding or self-forbidding which would generate obedience and transgression as its main ethical options. Badiou’s work is also part of a widespread attempt to reformulate ethics, politics, and epistemology without relying on the Enlightenment category of the individual, the privileged object of the social sciences. Badiou’s reliance on mathematical set theory adds to the impression that his philosophy has moved as far as possible away from the dominant categories of social knowledge and thereby from the social itself; indeed, he presumes there is “an insurmountable, properly ontological […] clash between post-evental fidelity and the normal pace of things, between truth and knowledge” (2001: 54). However, it is hard to detach Badiou’s four domains of the event from the social, understood as the collective historical circumstances under which knowledge and culture are organized and institutionalized. The domains are love, politics, art, and science, and Badiou’s examples from each are remarkably conventional: It is clear that under the effect of a loving encounter, if I want to be really faithful to it, I must completely rework my ordinary way of ‘living’ my situation. If I want to be faithful to the event of the ‘Cultural Revolution,’ then I must at least practise politics (in particular the relation with the workers) in an entirely different manner from that proposed by the socialist and trade-unionist traditions. And again, Berg and Webern, faithful to the musical event known by the name of ‘Schoenberg,’ cannot continue with fin-de-siècle Romanticism as if nothing had happened. After Einstein’s texts of 1905, if I am faithful to their radical novelty, I cannot continue to practise physics within its classical

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I will leave aside for now the case of love, but the other examples Badiou invokes dovetail unsurprisingly with dominant historical narratives. Other examples—Galileo’s inauguration of “mathematical physics,” Aeschylus’ manifestation of the possibilities of tragedy, the French Revolution of 1792 (2003a: 62), and Saul’s transformation into the Apostle Paul on the road to Damascus (2003b: 17)—similarly reinforce familiar understandings of what counts as an event, as does Badiou’s autobiographical account of having been seized and made subject by May 1968 (2001: 124). These events, though not reducible to whatever meaning they held or hold in popular opinion, cannot be detached from the social. The institutionalized domination of Romantic music contributed to the force of Schoenberg’s innovation, after all, and Galileo famously challenged and was repressed by the Roman Catholic Church through its considerable political power. If the events marked by Schoenberg and Galileo were events in thought, they were also events in the institutionalization of thought and its official history: in the capacity of thought to permeate, mobilize, and collaborate with social formations and to participate in power relations that are to some extent social. Indeed, even Badiou’s insistence that an event must proceed on the basis of the unnameable void of a situation seems likely to derive from an unelaborated belief that true thinking must serve the mobility of (social/political) power relations rather than their consolidation. The doctrine of the event presumes that any established truth is ripe for supplanting, perhaps in keeping with Walter Benjamin’s insight that “[t]here is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (1969: 256). It is hard to assess the lurking presence of the social here or to make sense of Badiou’s assertion that “the truth-process passes through the language of the situation” (2001: 81)—unscathed?—in light of Badiou’s blanket dismissal of the social, evidenced, for example, in his severe contrast between “opinion,” the “cement of sociality” which is suitable only to be circulated, and “truth,” which requires an “encounter”: “The Immortal that I am capable of being cannot be spurred in me by the effects of communicative sociality, it must be directly seized by fidelity” (2001: 50-51). It is easy to hear in this assertion a quarrel with Jürgen Habermas’ “discourse ethics,” a quarrel so fundamental (and shared by so many other post-Heideggereans) that Badiou does not even directly address it. Habermas believes that political change can be effected by people’s continuing efforts to learn about each

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other’s views by means of rational critical discourse.1 Habermas has criticized the degradation of public opinion in contemporary life, but he wishes to promote social and political institutions designed to foster rational critical discourse. In short, although truth is not a category prominent in his philosophy, Habermas’ position represents a faith that the categories of social knowledge, which mediate an individual’s understanding of her interests, desires, or utopian longings, are workable: that even though new dimensions of the interests and new possibilities for their discursive disclosure might emerge over time, the emergence will be grounded in the social and will in turn revise it. Badiou’s position, which is predicated on thinking as a break with established social knowledges, utterly denies any continuity between social knowledges and truth (2001: 43). From Badiou’s vantage point, Habermas endorses a simulacrum in which the ongoing process of consensusbuilding extends and consolidates the plenitude of identities or positions that initially enter into the communicative process. In other words, the practice of discourse ethics would probably constitute for Badiou a form of evil. Martha Nussbaum locates herself in a tradition which includes Habermas, and like him she presumes and prefers a “pluralistic liberal society” (2001: 415).2 Like Habermas, though, and like Badiou, Nussbaum wants to help transform the world, although her understanding of transformation is not structured fundamentally by the negation of the social. Indeed, Nussbaum’s penchant for developmental metaphors points to a conservative Romanticism in her work, an aesthetic and ethical fascination with the organic and the teleological that might seem to be utterly incompatible with the unpredictable irruption of an event that invents a new subject. An archeological reading, however, must not be a reductive one: rather than circumscribing Nussbaum with the terms I have described, I want to pursue a certain instability or ambivalence in her work that keeps her from being so neatly contrasted with the continentals. First, however, I want to home in on Nussbaum’s project by focusing on the essays which forged her claims for the philosophical study of literature. Nussbaum follows the lead of many readers of James’ The Golden Bowl in finding at its heart a problem of ethical or political perception, grasped or missed by one or more characters; it is beyond this metacritical essay’s scope to offer a full reading of The Golden Bowl, but some sense of the novel is 1

The position I describe is developed throughout Jürgen Habermas’s writings, but an especially useful introduction to his work is Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, 1993. 2 On Nussbaum’s intellectual kinship with Habermas, see “Humanities, Past and Future,” 2004.

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important to an understanding of Nussbaum’s position. The novel concentrates on four characters: Adam Verver and his daughter Maggie, wealthy American expatriates; Prince Amerigo, Maggie’s fiancé and then husband; and Charlotte Stant, Maggie’s impoverished friend who is revealed gradually to be someone Amerigo previously loved. After Maggie is settled with Amerigo, joining her wealth to Amerigo’s title, she brings Charlotte to visit in the hope that her father will find companionship, and Adam marries Charlotte. But after the birth of Maggie and Amerigo’s son, Maggie and the baby spend their days increasingly with Adam, sending Charlotte and Amerigo as their social representatives to the various events that compel the Ververs’ sponsorship. Charlotte and Amerigo begin or resume an affair, as Maggie realizes only when she discovers, through a coincidence, that Charlotte and Amerigo had once shopped together and examined a gilded crystal bowl, which Maggie purchases years later and which has a hidden flaw. In the final chapters of the novel, a set of curious transactions among the characters determines that Adam and Charlotte will go back to America against Charlotte’s wishes, while Maggie and Amerigo remain in England. Betrayals, discoveries, and sacrifices abound in the novel, evoked by some of James’ most oblique and subtle language. Nussbaum’s “Flawed Crystals: James’ The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy” argues against Maggie’s quest for moral perfection; it also argues that novels embody an indispensable strand of moral philosophy, one that cannot be replaced by conventionally academic forms of philosophical writing. The essay’s sequel, “‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Literature and the Moral Imagination,” develops Nussbaum’s claim that “the novel can be a paradigm of moral activity” by tracking the collaborative interactions of two pairs of characters (1990: 148). The ethical worldview that Nussbaum derives from The Golden Bowl in these essays is Romantic and liberal; the ethical stance she envisions need not be. Drawing on the novel’s Edenic metaphors (based on Adam Verver’s name and the drama in which Maggie, the woman made “from” him, encounters fateful knowledge), Nussbaum’s first essay calls the “world” of The Golden Bowl “a fallen world—a world, that is, in which innocence cannot be and is not safely preserved, a world where values and loves are so pervasively in tension with one another that there is no safe human expectation of a perfect fidelity to all throughout a life” (1990: 133). The terms “fallen” and “innocence” signal a lament, not a critique. Carolyn Porter’s reading of The Golden Bowl as a complex exploration of reification in late capitalism, or Thomas Peyser’s reading of the novel in the context of turn-of-the-century US imperialism could offer a more precise account of the industrial wealth and acquisitive predations that characterize the Ververs’

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“world” (Porter 1981: 121-164; Peyser 1998: 135-168). Elsewhere, however, Nussbaum more critically links the idea of “innocence” to Maggie’s impossible attempts at moral perfection, which fail because of her incompatible fidelities to her father, her husband, and Charlotte. These incompatible fidelities arise because of the developmental requirement that she “separate” from her father, previously her exclusive object of devotion (1990: 128). Nussbaum’s reading here depends heavily on exactly a kind of social knowledge that Badiou would find suspect. The developmental plot Nussbaum sketches depends on a highly normative reading of Maggie’s gender identity; it also naturalizes an Oedipally-charged family structure and particular understandings of marriage and heterosexual love. These norms make James’ plot intelligible, of course, but because Nussbaum does not acknowledge their specificity and contingency, she believes that she makes discoveries about “a human being’s relation to value in the world […] fundamentally” and about what Maggie needs to do “[t]o be a woman” (1990: 133-4), which for Nussbaum means, to be more fully human within the defining parameters of a gender. Nussbaum’s approach in these essays is founded on the Aristotelian idea that “ethics is the search for a specification of the good life for a human being,” a search which “cannot […] in any way be cut off from the study of the empirical and social conditions of human life […]” (1990: 139). Her second essay insists even more vehemently on the fundamentally social character of novels: “The novel […] is a cultural construct that itself helps to constitute its readers as social beings. […] The novel takes its stand with Aristotle, that human beings are fundamentally social […]” (1990: 166). Nussbaum’s grasp of the social in both essays is unempirical and ahistorical, and her grasp of the literary does not extend much beyond the level of character. Nevertheless, Nussbaum’s emphases on “intuitive perception” and “improvisatory response” (1990: 141) may well constitute an ethical stance of eagerness to be faithful to the emergence of the new. Improvisation and the Event Nussbaum values novels for depicting and exploring the kinds of “mystery and risk” which she believes play an important part in “our moral lives” (1990: 142). The mystery and risk both derive from the particularity of a novelistic world, which (due to a paradox of representation) can evoke the particularity of our real circumstances without, of course, exactly replicating them. For both Nussbaum and Badiou, ethical action is a gambit: a decision whose correctness, appropriateness, or desirability can in no way be

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guaranteed. Nussbaum links the capacity to undertake such gambits with maturation, contrasting Maggie’s initial, immature desire “to be told ahead of time exactly what’s right and when” with her later recognition that she must improvise without a script: “this is what adult deliberation is and should be. And there’s no safety in that, no safety at all” (1990: 138). Underlying his account of the impossibility of justifying one’s fidelity to an event is Badiou’s designation of risk-taking as one of the four fundamental desires— one might say conditions—of philosophy, one which modern life makes difficult: “Life is devoted to calculating security, and this obsession with calculating security is contrary to the Mallarméan hypothesis that thought begets a throw of the dice, because in such a world there is infinitely too much risk in a throw of the dice” (2003a: 41). One can hear Jean-Paul Sartre, unacknowledged by Badiou or Nussbaum, in this requirement to act without justifications, and the touch of Sartre marks a key instability in Nussbaum’s argument, for a belief in the undecidability that grounds deliberation is tonally and conceptually remote from the cherished Aristotelian practice of steering for a mean between imaginable extremes. In according ethical value to the newly and barely thinkable, Badiou and Nussbaum are quintessentially modern. The modern craving for the new is a complex and multiform phenomenon, however, and it is worth noting that neither Badiou nor Nussbaum jettisons the already-thought as if it were yesterday’s fashions. Even though Badiou is eager for the event that derives from the unthought of a situation and thereby leaves behind the established understanding of that situation, the second form of evil he outlines is the betrayal of truth, the retrospective insistence that the “Immortal in myself” brought into being by the truth “never existed” (2001: 79). He makes clear, moreover, that one event need not supersede another: we may have been produced as subjects by the French Revolution as well as by May 1968, and indeed we may not have finished being faithful to the truth-process set in motion by either event (2003a: 67). Nussbaum similarly insists that the kind of ethical improvisation she recommends is “responsible to the history of commitment and to the ongoing structures that go to constitute her [an ethical actor’s] context” (1990: 156). Modern fascinations with novelties and generative powers cannot be utterly separated from capitalist practices of marketing and investment—indeed, the desire to separate them might partake of the fantasy of moral purity that Nussbaum critiques—but Badiou’s or Nussbaum’s commitments to novelty do not preclude the past’s capacity to structure and inhabit the present. Nussbaum’s and Badiou’s versions of the new are importantly distinct from each other, though. For Badiou, an event is a break which cannot even be conceptualized in the conventional terms provided by logic and spatial

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relations (negation, inversion, effect, sequence, etc.). It is a newness in the categories of thought. Nussbaum’s emphasis on the new, implicit in her attention to the power of enhanced perception, is much more conventionally rooted in her Aristotelian attention to the particular, so that she calls for “the sustained exploration of particular lives that a text such as this one makes possible” (1990: 139). Her uncritical reliance on norms surfaces often. Nevertheless, her work teeters on the brink of a more radical commitment to the new. For example, the phrase she takes from James to characterize ethical responsiveness, “finely aware,” could fit either an empiricist scenario (in which awareness brings more adequate perception of what is) or a Badiouesque model of openness to the as-yet-unthought that might be triggered by particulars. Evidence for this latter possibility might be found in the culmination of her first essay on The Golden Bowl, which suddenly raises the possibility that Charlotte’s effacement at the end of the novel constitutes an uncanny residue, or supplement unsettling the claims for responsiveness and vision previously made on behalf of Maggie and readers who follow her (1990: 145). Moreover, Nussbaum emphasizes the importance of a reader’s being prepared “to alter his or her prima facie conception of the good in the light of the new experience,” experience which is presented (via James) as something “created” rather than merely put forth by the world (1990: 141, 153). Nussbaum’s language of development and maturity, evoking normative transitions that can be captured by terms such as “separation,” is deeply at odds with her attraction to new apprehensions that disrupt and supplant old beliefs. In this respect, Nussbaum’s interest in The Golden Bowl is significant, for James struggled throughout his writings to render the effect of a leap in thought: She [Isabel Archer Osmond] sits up, by her dying fire, far into the night, under the spell of recognitions on which she finds the last sharpness suddenly wait. It is a representation simply of her motionlessly seeing, and an attempt withal to make the mere lucidity of her act as “interesting” as the surprise of a caravan or the identification of a pirate. (1984a: 57)

It might be objected that “recognitions” and “seeing” cannot designate anything like an event: the re-cognized is, strictly speaking, the alreadythought, after all, and the predominance of the visual delimits Enlightenment empiricism. By the same token, Nussbaum’s reiteration of “perception” and “responsiveness” might be disqualified from genuine novelty. These points are indisputable, on their own terms: but they do not manifest an appropriate

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sense of the figurative, polyvocal, and intricately historical nature of language. If we sort all the terms for thinking according to whether they are utterly loyal to the insights of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and their heirs, and if we consider any divergence to signal an unambiguous and deplorable intellectual regression, then we have substituted the trading of passwords for a genuine engagement with writings not informed by this continental tradition. We must be open to the possibility that a range of thinkers, even those working within the privileged metaphors of the Enlightenment, grapple with the limits of the figures and concepts they have inherited. Henry James was one of the most famous exponents of the novel as the genre of observation. The kind of observation James celebrated was always in tension with the purely visual: it comprised powers of inference, speculation, and interpretation (offering a punning relationship between sight and insight), and it thrived on the interplay between the optical (as a privileged but limited mode of cognition, one which could be located in an individualized vantage-point) and the linguistic (which could evoke and defy optical possibilities, and which could summon up and exceed an individual’s speech or consciousness). In his manifesto “The Art of Fiction,” James famously urged the prospective writer to be “‘one of the people on whom nothing is lost’”—people who have “[t]he power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern […]” (1984: 52). This advice is preceded by an anecdote about a fellow writer who was credited with representing in a novel “the nature and way of life of the French Protestant youth,” even though the basis for her account had been merely a “glimpse,” through an open door, of young Protestants finishing a meal. Her literary performance, though not explicitly characterized as naming the void of a situation, is most certainly characterized by James as a leap or break, especially with positivist understandings of experience. The anonymous writer’s glimpse resulted in a novel, which I called a literary performance because I want to link this productive glimpse with Nussbaum’s emphasis on improvisation and with the widespread academic interest in performativity kicked off by Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Although Butler’s account of performativity is at the center of her landmark text, whereas Nussbaum only sketches improvisation, their accounts converge in revealing the apparently consistent and the apparently continuous to be riddled with disjunctive invention. Butler reframes the apparent being or becoming of gender as “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance […]” (1990: 33). Nussbaum, as we have seen, normalizes gender, but she focuses in her second essay on

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complications to perception and action that resemble Butler’s emphasis. As I have stressed, perception is active and constructive for Nussbaum: she cites Aristotle’s claim that “‘the decision rests with perception’” to emphasize perception’s active share in thinking (1990: 141). Perception is also mediated, to the extent that Nussbaum claims that the very metaphor through which Adam is represented as perceiving Maggie—that of a sea creature bound on her own adventures—is “a moral achievement in its own right”: “here is where his sacrifice, his essential moral choice, takes place” (1990: 151). In this way, Nussbaum joins epistemology to ethics as well as perception to performance. Moving closer to Butler, Nussbaum emphasizes that Adam’s decision to return to America cannot be separated from its enactment, and that its ethical significance cannot be captured in the form of a logical proposition: The general sacrificial idea—that he will go off to America with Charlotte—is in itself no solution. For it to become a solution it has to be offered in the right way at the right time in the right tone, in such a way that she can take it; offered without pressing any of the hidden springs of guilt and loyalty in her that he knows so clearly how to press; offered so that he gives her up with greatness, with beauty, in a way that she can love and find wonderful. (1990: 150)

Nussbaum’s sentimentalization of this bond between father and daughter, especially since they are controllers of wealth who control much about their Apostles’ fates, marks a tremendous blind spot. However, just as Butler reveals ongoing performance—and a potential for action and subversion—at the heart of gender, Nussbaum unravels the categories of perception and decision to reveal the ongoing construction of their possibility by their participants. Badiou’s inclusion of love among his four categories of the event is not entirely compelling—a better account appears in his study of Saint Paul, which does not presume that the subject of love would be a classic dyad and which sketches the potential for early Christian love to undercut established social relations (2003b: 89)—but it seems to proceed from an analogous desire to find even in private interpersonal relations permeated by social roles a defamiliarizing and generative volatility. Given the loose association of ethics with the personal and politics with the public, the turn to ethics that animates both Badiou and Nussbaum might bespeak a widespread desire to rethink possibilities for action that have been formulated within a collective public context (as revolution and protest, for example) at the micro-level, even if ultimately the modern distinction between public and private will not adequately name this difference.

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The critique Badiou could make of novels generally is that they simply recirculate opinion and shape it aesthetically. Yet one way of framing the interest of James’ novels, especially the novels of his late career, is that they use the trappings of representation (such as characters, quoted speech, renderings of internal thought processes, and the evocation of plausible settings) to achieve effects that cannot be understood in terms of representation. James’ novels put language drenched in social meaning (such as James’ recurrent economic metaphors) to ends that are not exclusively social. In other words, James’ novels might be read as performing the social or even improvising with respect to the social. Perhaps the relationship of thinking to the social can be something far more complicated and promising than mere negation. The point of my argument is not to install James with Joyce and Mallarmé in a canon of modernist and proto-modernist writers who can be read as negating and protesting the social, however. James’ importance here stems from the continuities between his work and that of more conventional novelists. He demonstrates a commitment to the social as well as something akin to Badiou’s notion of fidelity to an event. The relationship between an event, for Badiou, and a single work of literature is not easy to determine. Badiou follows Heidegger in believing that “poetry” (fitting the canon I described at the outset) has in some instances acted “in relay with philosophy;” however, he insists on a productive separation between philosophy and poetry, a separation that “liberates the poem […] as a singular operation of truth” (2003a: 96, 98). Given Badiou’s cultural examples—Aeschylus as the bearer of tragedy and Schoenberg of atonal music—it is easy to imagine that literary modernism might count for him as an event, although perhaps one could break with Badiou’s usual practice and resist encapsulating modernism in a single work or author. The Golden Bowl and Henry James are unlikely touchstones for modernism, anyway, although James’ later work has sometimes been identified as transitional between realism and modernism. Suppose, though, that what a normalizing, progressivist literary history names as a transition might sometimes mask an event. For example, Sharon Cameron offers a way of reading a rupture running throughout The Golden Bowl, a rupture in which the materials of a thematic reading of a novel are juxtaposed with a repeated staging of a problem of reference which would call them into question. She identifies The Golden Bowl as taking up the problem of assigning meaning in light of the disconnection between thought and the world: the problem, for instance, of interpreting Charlotte’s assertion to Amerigo, “‘You don’t refer… I refer’” (Cameron 1989: 88-90, 93; James 1987: 116). Cameron understands the book’s exploration of reference to be unapologetically separate from the “officially sanctioned thematic of the

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daughter’s too close connection to the father, and from the rectification of this wrong by the aggression of another one” (1989: 119). One need not insist on this separation: indeed, the problem of reference as Cameron outlines it may resonate with the problem of filial connection (whether Maggie refers, as heiress and daughter, to her father) and the problem of later actions referencing back to previous ones. The kind of rupture Cameron describes may also run through other novels: through Joyce’s Ulysses, which bubbles semiotically even as it represents Dublin and The Odyssey; but also through endless numbers of novels, famous or forgotten, in which novelistic representation is both employed and undermined, problematized, or interrogated. (This hypothesis could account for the proliferation of critical essays that reveal various classic realist novels to be self-subverting, selfdeconstructive, or proto-postmodern.) These ruptures might constitute, not a timeless deconstructive plot about the unfixity of meaning, but specific stagings and versions of a gap and relationship between novelistic representation (grounded in the social) and nonrepresentational dimensions of language that endow thinking with a power to bypass the social. Badiou has announced his intention to develop his thought in order to address “how truths appear” as distinct from “their being” (2001: lvii, lviii). It might be possible to conceive of a truth’s mode of appearing as a social and historical multiple—as an effect of unwitting collaboration—without dissolving its singularity and radical novelty: without reducing it to the demographic of a generation or an artistic school, for example. From this perspective, a novel such as The Golden Bowl might mark emergent subjectivities made possible by a number of events: among them, representation (having emerged in some archaic era); the more recent advent of novelistic representation in particular; companionate marriage (colliding with novelistic representation to produce marriage plots); a critique of capitalism; and a critique of imperialism. By viewing The Golden Bowl as part of an ensemble, one need not claim it as a unique evental site; by viewing it as instrumental to multiple subjectivities—and to situations as well as events—one can view it as operating within as well as against the register of representation. If Cameron’s reading of The Golden Bowl can be sustained, then both this novel and Nussbaum’s essays about it manifest and worry a rift between thinking and the social. Nussbaum’s ambivalence about the social marks it as a significant problem for her. She insists upon the social nature of ethics and the desirability of formulating norms at the same time that she is highly suspicious of the general, which she seems to equate with the codification of obligations according to social roles, as in the vapid generalization that she offers to demonstrate a bad readerly inference, “‘All daughters should treat

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their fathers as Maggie treats Adam here’” (1990: 166). Like Badiou, who believes in the universal claims of ethics but not any “ethics in general” (2001: lvi), Nussbaum values not the general but the universal, and she sees the universal tendency in ethics as “not a principle, but a direction of thought and imagination” (1990: 167). Her interest in “getting the tip” (a phrase she borrows from a passage about Bob Assignham), a transaction between persons about a particular that results in a valuable but unpredictable kind of learning, bespeaks this same interest in moving between particulars and something universal but not via the more or less social route of generalization. Nussbaum’s norms tend to consist of highly figurative accounts of receptive ethical stances; they could in this respect be compared to Badiou’s ethical exhortations: This ethics combines, then, under the imperative to “Keep going!”, resources of discernment (do not fall for simulacra), of courage (do not give up), and of moderation [réserve] (do not get carried away to the extremes of Totality). (2001: 91)

Like Nussbaum’s, Badiou’s language here struggles to pry a fidelity to thinking out of the clotted discourses of social convention. The separation of philosophy from the social sciences, part of modernity’s tendency toward analytic subdivision and elaborate disciplinary specialization, might constitute precisely the sort of dangerous simulation against which Badiou warns (Foucault 1973: 346). Post-Nietzschean philosophy has developed a powerful critique of the social sciences as bearers of some of the Enlightenment’s most pernicious tendencies; Badiou warns ominously in this regard that “Averages, statistics, sociology, history, or polls are not capable of teaching us what the history of a truth is” (2003a: 53). However, it is possible that philosophy has also grown monstrous, both because of its isolation from the social sciences and (in the Anglo-American strand in which Nussbaum can be located) because of its underscrutinized reliance on them.3 One misses in Nussbaum’s allegiance to the social a consideration of the possibility that vivid feeling and strong attunement can be vehicles of a socialization which blocks and circumscribes a subject’s access to the new. However, one also misses in Badiou’s repudiation of the social any recognition that the fidelity of a subject of truth must be performed 3

Nussbaum, who has collaborated with economist Amartya Sen in criticizing certain forms of economic thought, and who makes use of his provocative conception of “capacity” in her later work, has so far still stopped short of developing the disciplinary implications of attentive thought’s potential to undermine received truths. See Nussbaum, 1995: xv, 44-7; Nussbaum, 1999.

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in a social world: that Webern and Berg, loyal to an event named as “Schoenberg” and constituted as subjects (or jointly as a subject) by that event, must invent and enact the terms of their loyalty on social terrains. An event for which James, Nussbaum, and Badiou might be understood to lay groundwork could not, of course, be the restoration of some kind of wholeness transcending these disciplinary rifts. But it may be possible for us to think toward the onset of an event which could derive from the void of the current distinction between philosophy and the social sciences, an event which would not be the triumph of either but the possibility of something new.4 Nussbaum’s work and Badiou’s might mark two doxologically divergent but archeologically parallel attempts to stage an encounter between philosophy and the social: the social terrains of norms, affects, identities, perceptions, and performances (for Nussbaum) and the social institutions and media that shape our access to events (for Badiou). Bibliography Badiou, Alain (2003a). Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy, London: Continuum. —— (2003b). Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Stanford: Stanford UP. —— (2001). Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, London: Verso. Benjamin, Walter (1969). Illuminations, New York: Schocken. Butler, Judith (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Cameron, Sharon (1989). Thinking in Henry James, Chicago: U of Chicago P. Dickinson, Emily (1960). The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Boston: Little, Brown. Feltham, Oliver, and Justin Clemens (2003). “An Introduction to Alain Badiou’s Philosophy,” Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy, London: Continuum, 1-38. Foucault, Michel (1990). The Use of Pleasure, New York: Vintage. —— (1988). The Care of the Self, New York: Vintage.

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It is important to bear in mind that analytic philosophy, dominant in the US, departs from the Heideggerean and Aristotelian traditions I have sketched. The task of assessing whether analytic philosophy, too, is fraught by desire and contempt for the social is beyond the scope of this essay.

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—— (1973). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage. Habermas, Jürgen (1993). Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heidegger, Martin (1993). Basic Writings, San Francisco: Harper Collins. James, Henry (1987). The Golden Bowl, New York: Penguin. —— (1984a). The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, Boston: Northeastern UP. —— (1984b). Literary Criticism, New York: Library of America. Kristeva, Julia (1984). Revolution in Poetic Language, New York: Columbia UP. Nussbaum, Martha (2004). “Humanities, Past and Future,” Research Universities and the Academic Disciplines, AAU Centennial Meeting, Oct. 16, 2000 [online]. Available from: http://www.aau.edu/aau/ Nussbaum10.00.html [accessed 26 May 2004]. —— (2001). Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP. —— (1999). Sex and Social Justice, New York: Oxford UP. —— (1995). Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Boston: Beacon. —— (1990). Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, New York: Oxford UP. Peyser, Thomas (1998). Utopia and Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American Literary Realism, Durham, NC: Duke UP. Porter, Carolyn (1981). Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP.

EXECRABLE SPEECH: LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE’S BAGATELLES POUR UN MASSACRE NICHOLAS CHARE This essay explores the ethical implications of Julia Kristeva’s use of the work of the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline in her book Powers of Horror. It focuses particularly on Céline’s anti-semitic pamphlet Bagatelles pour un massacre, and considers it as an example of psychotic writing. Chare explores the justification of the negative critique Kristeva has suffered for using the text by considering the status of the pamphlets in relation to the politics of their author, and then through a reading of Bagatelles pour un massacre informed by Judith Butler’s work on hatespeech, drawing in particular on her notion of “reappropriation.”

“Je suis le bouc” wrote Louis-Ferdinand Céline at the end of the Second World War, “I am the scapegoat” (Alméras 2000: 7). Céline is the pseudonym of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (1894-1961), one of France’s most important authors in the inter-war years. His first book Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) published in 1932; was a bestseller. It follows the life of the character Ferdinand Bardamu, beginning with his experiences in the First World War—through journeys to French colonial Africa and the United States of America—and ending with an account of his time as a doctor working in one of the poorer districts of Paris. The book is based loosely on Destouches’ own life. From his first-hand knowledge of the sufferings of the Parisian poor, Destouches might have been expected to sympathize with socialism but instead he identified increasingly with right wing politics in the run up to, and during, the Second World War. Between 1936 and 1942 Céline wrote four “pamphlets” or ostensible satirical tracts. The first, Mea culpa, is an attack upon communism and the USSR. The remaining three, Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937), L’école des cadavres (1938) and Les beaux draps (1941) are all primarily anti-semitic diatribes. In Powers of Horror Julia Kristeva devotes an entire chapter to the pamphlets entitled “Ours to Jew or Die,” in which she argues that to isolate these writings from the rest of Céline’s work would constitute an “ideological stance, not an analytic or literary position” (Kristeva, 1982: 174). Kristeva’s decision to use the pamphlets to support the arguments that she advances about the role of modernist literature in the twentieth century has provoked

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much criticism. This essay will explore how justified this negative reaction is, firstly by way of a consideration of the status of the pamphlets in relation to the politics of their author, and then through a reading of the matter of Bagatelles pour un massacre informed by Judith Butler’s work on hatespeech, drawing in particular on her notion of “reappropriation.” It will begin by situating Kristeva’s ideas about Céline’s writings in relation to the entirety of her thinking about abjection. Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, first published in French in 1980 and then subsequently translated into English two years later, has been highly influential across many disciplines. The concept of abjection as it is developed in Powers of Horror has proved useful in fields as diverse as anthropology, art history, criminology, film studies and literary studies.1 In the book Kristeva uses the writings of the French author Louis-Ferdinand Céline as the mainstay for her argument that in the contemporary Western world, literature has replaced the sacred as the site where abjection is sublimated. In brief, for Kristeva abjection is a key process during the formation of the subject. It is the action of separation which is a necessary precursor to the mirror-stage. Lacan describes the mirror-stage as a drama “whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation” (Lacan 1977: 4). The child exists within a somatic maelstrom— a mess of bodily functions—and lives only as its insides. The mirror provides the child with a passport to the outside, the reflection it affords anchors the fragmented body-image to “a form of its totality” that exists exterior to it (Lacan 1977: 4). This is not, however, the first journey the infant undertakes. Lacan does not delve deeply enough into the pre-history of the subject. He accounts for the stage at which the child “is” but “is” only as “frustration,” “is” as a body that baffles and bewilders but which is felt as a singular insufficiency. I am not up to the task of being me but I know that I am. The child is already a desiring being, a wanting self-sufficiency. The time of maternal plenitude has passed and will shortly become the past.2 Kristeva seeks to explain how the child separates from the mother in order for the 1

See for example, Ferguson’s Expectations of Modernity, 1999; Ockman’s Ingres’ Eroticized Bodies: Retracing the Serpentine Line, 1995; Valier’s “Punishment, Border Crossings and the Powers of Horror,” 2002; “The Picture of Abjection: Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration,” Chanter, 2004; Creed’s The Monstrous Feminine, 1993; and Gustafson’s Absent Mothers and Orphaned Fathers, 1995. 2 Lacan’s description of the child’s entry into a state of anticipation also suggests the beginning of a sense of futurity for the infant. The mirror stage does not solely bring the child outside of itself but also outside of the present. There is no looking back for the infant once looking forwards and backwards become possibilities, once the reflection has supplemented the child’s rhythmic temporality with a linear one.

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mirror-stage to take place; she describes how for the infant prior to the “that’s me in the mirror” of the mirror-stage there must also be a recognition of “that’s not me” in relation to the mother. Abjection “is a precondition of narcissism.” “Even before being like, ‘I’ am not but do separate, reject, abject” (1982: 13).3 Abjection, a series of partial and provisional separations from the mother that make the mirror-stage possible, is repressed by the subject. Without this repression the subject would have to confront its own brittleness. “The more or less beautiful image in which I behold or recognize myself rests upon an abjection that sunders it as soon as repression, the constant watchman, is relaxed” (1982: 13). Kristeva emphasizes that the abject is a part of us but a part of us that it is dangerous to acknowledge, it is a part of us that must be kept apart, that must be managed. This management role was previously performed by the sacred. Abjection “accompanies all religious structurings” and the “various means of purifying the abject—the various catharses—make up the history of religions” (1982: 17). In the predominantly secular society that exists in the contemporary Western world, the role of purification falls to the artist. The “aesthetic task” in the present “amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless ‘primacy’ constituted by primal repression” (1982: 18). This is the terrain of the abject, a terrain over which great modern literature unfolds: “Dostoyevsky, Lautréamont, Proust, Artaud, Kafka, Céline” (Kristeva 1982: 18). Céline writes back to the mother out of which he became, unwriting the symbolic in the process. Such a challenge to the symbolic function could potentially lead to psychosis but Céline’s texts are “able to master this latent psychotic state” through their “literary devices and writing style” (Kristeva 1996: 231). Modernist writing, as exemplified by Céline, must of necessity touch the void that is psychosis. The modernist aesthetic functions to sublimate the abject, that which would otherwise destroy the subject through overwhelming the symbolic and rendering the subject psychotic. The abject is that which exceeds the rational; it is the force of unreason that Michel Foucault describes in the conclusion to Madness and Civilization, a force that must be cathected. “There is no madness except as the final instant of the work of art—the work endlessly drives madness to its limits; where there is a work of art, there is no madness; and yet madness is contemporary with the work of art, since it inaugurates the time of its truth” (2001: 274). The work of art plays out psychic violence in language rather than in reality. Kelly Oliver writes of this cathection that “poetic murders are better than real 3

The emphasis in this quotation and in all subsequent quotations is that of the original author.

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murders” (1993: 102). The defence of Céline is that he writes hatred rather than enacts it. Oliver, whilst troubled by Kristeva’s use of Céline, is willing to give the thinker the benefit of the doubt. This benevolence is not universally shared. For example, Jennifer Stone writes in her essay “The Horrors of Power: A Critique of Kristeva,” that Kristeva “has no political or ideological bearings when faced with Céline’s cadaver” and accuses her of having a “hypnotic and nauseating fascination with fascism” (1983: 47). Stone abjects Powers of Horror, she is inclined to vomit at the writer’s perceived attraction to fascism. She reads with her stomach. This reaction is of note because Kristeva describes abjection—which is characterized by a feeling of disgust—as possessing a moral aspect during the first chapter of Powers of Horror. Stone’s sentiment might be understood as a manifestation of what could be called a “visceral ethics.” In her book Reproductions of Banality Alice Yaeger Kaplan also expresses disquiet with Kristeva’s “rescue of Céline” (1986: 108). The “aesthetic links in Powers of Horror are specifically to prehistorical, authorless forms of language production, which means that the ‘historical context drops out of the picture’” (1986: 109). This presents severe problems for any effort to understand of the nature of Destouches’ fascism. For Kaplan, Kristeva’s approach is an ahistorical one which reduces fascism to the status of an aberration which can be readily dissociated from an aesthetically radical modernist agenda.4 Kaplan wants an approach that places Céline’s writings in their historical context, and pays closer attention to how the pamphlets were received and read in France when they were published. She points out that the fascist appreciation of Céline’s texts extended beyond their subject-matter to the syntax itself. Kaplan quotes from a review of Bagatelles pour un massacre written by the journalist Lucien Rebatet in 1938, in which he describes how he and his newspaper colleagues at Je Suis Partout performed collective readings of parts of the pamphlet. Rebatet writes: “let us read Céline in chorus[…] I want to make you hear[…] this joyous and formidable voice” (1986: 126). In 1938 Bagatelles pour un massacre existed not just as printed pages, but as a shared 4

Stone shares Kaplan’s concern with the lack of attention Kristeva pays to the historical circumstances within which the pamphlets were produced. “Céline’s political pamphlets, when read in a 1980s context, may seem to be divorced from the social conditions which led to their emergence and which made their racist programme possible. But if one considers the historical place of production of these anti-semitic writings, one cannot miss the signs to the factories of genocide” (1983: 46). Kristeva would understand both fascism and modernist literature to be symptoms of the identity crisis precipitated by our era having put ‘rationality into question’ (1996: 230). The pamphlets are indubitably of their time.

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experience, and the sound of the prose was celebrated as much as the content. Kristeva fails to adduce the importance of Destouches’ personal politics. Nor does she pay sufficient attention to the way in which his work was received. Stone is critical of Kristeva for engaging with a contagious text, for catching Céline’s right wing politics. Kaplan, on the other hand, is troubled by her failure to engage with the politics of Destouches and his contemporaries. The names Céline and Destouches are used interchangeably here, but are they the same? Kaplan and Stone raise important questions about the relationship that exists between the writer and the written, the writer and the reader, and the reader and the written. For Stone, Céline is the source of a disease (fascist politics) for which his pamphlets are the carriers, retaining the potential to infect their readers. Kaplan however does not suggest that Kristeva has become contaminated by the politics of the pamphlets but rather that her way of reading them is irresponsible precisely because she avoids engaging with those politics. For Stone, Céline and Destouches seem to be one and the same whereas Kaplan opens up the possibility that, whilst Destouches is tied to a historical moment, Céline is not. Céline can be read out of context. Kaplan sees this reading out of context as highly problematic but not without value. This essay will subsequently consider the ethics of such a reading (perhaps there is even an ethical responsibility to read certain texts out of the original context of their enunciation) as part of its discussion of Judith Butler’s work, but first it is necessary to focus on the status of meaning in relation to the text. Meaning and Morality Any ethics related to the text would seem to need to be grounded upon the responsibility for meaning. We measure the content of any text against the ethical template we have inherited, and then judge it as either good or bad. We form an opinion of the text based upon what it means to us, but where does that meaning originate? Does meaning come from the writer, the written or the reader? Or does it emerge somewhere in-between? Both Kaplan and Stone emphasize the importance of an attention to historical context in any reading of the pamphlets. This does seem to suggest that meaning is contingent; in any given text it is not something that is inherent and unchanging. Meaning shifts with the moment. A context is, of course, not itself inherent and unchanging, and indeed it may even be argued that it too is authored. This would seem to privilege the reader as the locus of meaning. The reader decides the context within which the text should be read. The reader also decides how the text will mean. This understanding of the

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practice of reading calls for a contextual ethics. The context Kristeva produces for her reading is not sufficiently historical for Kaplan and Stone, hence it is an unethical one. Stone however does seem to hold out the possibility that the text contains something of the politics that produced it, that its politics transcend the historical moment within which it was produced. Its history is a part of it, not apart from it. Kristeva is seduced by the content of Céline’s writings, she does not produce that content. Stone does not countenance the possibility that the pamphlets written in the name of Céline might not be fascist. This is either because Destouches, as a fascist writing at a time when fascism was in the ascendancy, has permanently infected the words he used with his own political ideas, or because the words in the pamphlets have a particular and perpetual politics of their own; either the author and his time have some authority, or language is itself authoritative. The latter understanding would, for Foucault, be an example of the reintroduction of an author-function by a sleight of reading, in which “the empirical characteristics of the author” are transposed into the text in the form of “a transcendental anonymity” (Foucault 1998: 208). The words possess a unique hidden meaning if only you work hard enough to tease it out. Both Foucault and Roland Barthes have, in their different ways, radically challenged the notion of authorial intention. Their ideas about the status of the author form part of the structure of the commonplace in contemporary literary theory but I feel that it is worthwhile rereading old writing here, especially given Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s own professed fears about his inability to control the text he “authored.” In Bagatelles pour un massacre he writes of his fear that his work will be plagiarized: Si mon petit ou gros navet contient quelque authentique substance, émotive, lyrique, il sera par eux promptement décortiqué, dégluti…Les Juifs sont plutôt mal doués pour les arts, biologiquement, du fond même de leur nature.5 (Bagatelles pour un massacre, 69)

Céline is afraid that the body of his text will be skinned, that what he writes will be taken from him and incorporated into the work of others. He is frightened that the “Jews” will steal from his own work to make up for their own lack of originality.6 Here, as occurs several times elsewhere in the 5

“If my minor or coarse penny dreadful has any originality to it, sentimentally or stylistically; it will swiftly be stripped and swallowed by them… The Jews are really no good at the arts, it’s biological, and goes to the heart of their character.” (My translation) 6 What Céline means by the term Jew is complicated. The figure of the Jew becomes

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pamphlets, Céline is projecting aspects of his own behaviour onto others. Kaplan has revealed that Bagatelles pour un massacre is “but a hastily compiled collection of references that lend the text an erudite veneer that is pure simulacrum” (1995: 37). The author has liberally stripped from the work of others to furnish his own text. His pamphlet is “a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture,” (Barthes 1977: 146) with a marked emphasis on weaving the material written by Céline’s anti-semitic literary precursors into the end product. His pamphlet is not his own. If the politics of the pamphlets exist in the words on the page then this politics precedes Céline. The writer “can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original” (Barthes 1977: 146). This kind of understanding of writing seems to invite an abnegation of responsibility on the part of the author: I write what is always already written, therefore I never really write. Writing is unoriginal, the writer acts as conduit not creator. Céline is afraid that his work might be appropriated by another just as he has misappropriated other people’s writings. He does not explicitly express the concern that his work will cease to mean in the same way if it is “resited” by someone else somewhere else, but I think we can entertain the possibility that this is what is troubling him. I will return to this anxiety around appropriation later. Barthes did not continue to maintain the polemical position he appeared to endorse in the essay The Death of the Author in 1968. By the time he gave the lecture Leçon (1978) almost ten years later, there was a clear emphasis on the importance of the figure of the author. In Leçon Barthes states that although the politics of the author are unimportant, the way the author uses language is of great consequence. If we take the linguistic displacements that writers carry out into account, then from this perspective Barthes argues that Céline is just as important as Hugo, and Chateaubriand as Zola (1978: 17). For Barthes, the style of the text can undermine and counteract the content. He writes that it is “à l’intérieur de la langue que la langue doit être combattue, dévoyée: non par le message dont elle est l’instrument, mais par le jeu des mots dont elle est le théâtre”7 (1978: 16-17). In this sense the hatred ostensibly contained in the pamphlets might be said to be confounded by the means of its communication. The style blunts the subject-matter, or perhaps the medium muddies the message. All language is inherently fascist almost all encompassing within the pamphlets. Africans, aristocrats, freemasons, Soviets and surrealists are each enjuivés or “jewified” at some point. It is this quality which has rendered these texts by Céline impervious to a “thematic political analysis” (Kaplan 1986: 108). 7 “it is inside language that language must be fought, misled: not by the meaning for which it is the vehicle, but by the play of words for which it is the stage.” (My translation)

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because it insists on saying something, but this fascism can be fought through the means by which things are said (1978: 14). As mentioned earlier, however, far from offering an escape from fascism, Kaplan suggests that the style of the pamphlets is in fact integral to their ideology. It is the rhythm of the prose as much as its purport that gives the pamphlets their politics. Style is political, and the style of these pamphlets is one that is allied to fascism. A Putrid Poetics If we accept that the style as well as the subject-matter of the pamphlets is morally reprehensible, then does this mean that what we might call Céline’s “putrid poetics” should be placed into permanent quarantine? Kaplan and Stone are critical of Kristeva because she is not condemnatory enough of the ideological content of the pamphlets. Is it therefore ethically sound to engage with a work like Bagatelles pour un massacre as long as writer distance their politics from the politics of the work? Is commentary permissible if the requisite tone of disdain is maintained throughout, so long as it is made explicit that Céline’s politics are objectionable? Would this kind of reading be an ethically acceptable one? Or would this kind of reading merely help to fortify the fascist politics it seeks to censure? The citing of passages from Céline’s pamphlets within the context of a critical essay could be understood to provide a source of reinvigoration for those passages. Céline is still worth writing about, even in a negative sense. The condemnatory essay is always, in some sense, complicit with that which it seeks to castigate. It must repeat the writing it wishes to hold to account. An outright denunciation of the content of the pamphlets also sentences hundreds of pages of words to a singular meaning. A simple proscription of the pamphlets as anti-semitic and fascist serves to confirm them as such. The possibility that language might resist the politics it was intended to support is not entertained. Kaplan and Stone seek to preserve the pamphlets in their fascist context and thereby perpetuate that context. They do not consider the possibility that parts of the pamphlets could be made to mean differently if they were taken out of context. In her book Excitable Speech (1997), Judith Butler describes how the contexts of the speech act are “never fully determined in advance” and explains that there is always “the possibility for the speech act to take on a non-ordinary meaning, to function in contexts where it has not belonged” (1997: 161). Through the process of “reappropriation” (the putting into play of the speech act in more favourable contexts) a negative term can undergo an affirmative resignification. Butler illustrates this process through a

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discussion of the term “queer” in the final chapter of her book Bodies that Matter (1993: 223-242). Can what Butler writes about the performative be applied to Bagatelles pour un masscare? There is a significant difference between a single term and several hundred pages of text. As discussed earlier however, Céline himself seemed troubled by the possibility of reappropriation. We might understand his reluctance to acknowledge his influences in Bagatelles pour un masscare – the silent citations throughout the pamphlet – as a manifestation of his desire to preserve the illusion of intention in his work. The hatred in the pamphlets, which Kaplan and Stone accord such authority to, accumulates that “force of authority through the repetition or citation of a prior, authoritative set of practices” (Butler 1993: 227). Hatred exists as quotation. The hatred in the pamphlets succeeds because it draws upon the accumulated force of its previous expressions. Kaplan and Stone do nothing to challenge this cumulative power by their attitude. Kristeva at least refuses to unquestioningly promulgate a politics of disapprobation in Powers of Horror, as demonstrated by her desire to read the pamphlets outside of their usual context. She therefore instigates a rupture in the usually uninterrupted line of citational descent which lends Céline’s language its perceived power. Like speech acts, the written word is separated from its future effects by a gap. Kristeva works within this gap. She does not assume a position of sovereignty in relation to the pamphlets, the reader is not rendered master of meaning here. Kristeva exercises her agency within the constraints of a language which always already antecedes and constitutes her. Butler believes that agency begins where sovereignty wanes. “The one who acts (who is not the same as the sovereign subject) acts precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted as an actor and, hence, operating within a linguistic field of enabling constraints from the outset” (1997: 16). The act of “reappropriation” is not the birth of the sovereign reader. The reader who writes hate-speech out of context, who writes hatred in order to contest it, does not have ultimate control over the language they employ. This absence of control is part of the “subversive promise” of agency (Butler 1993: 241). It is our ethical responsibility to make good this promise. But there is the matter of the pamphlets. The Matter of the Pamphlets Céline prohibited the republication of the pamphlets and his descendants have continued this interdiction (Alméras 2000: 7-8). This voluntary suppression took place to prevent the pamphlets from continuing to cause harm after the war. Bagatelles pour un massacre sold well prior to this self-

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censorship, with Céline estimating that he earned 60,000 to 80,000 old francs in royalties from the pamphlet (Alméras 1995: 76). Despite the fact that by the end of the war 75,000 copies of the work had been sold in France alone, it is now difficult to find and gain access to the work (Hewitt 1999: 171). This has helped to contribute to its mythic status (Godard 1998: 96). The more the work is engaged with the less the legend of its evil brilliance can continue to gain currency. In this sense projects like those of Kaplan and Kristeva are both of value, in that they contribute to the ongoing operation of debunking the fictions that surround Céline’s pamphlets. It would appear improper however to advocate a reprinting of the pamphlets if it were to become permissible, nor is the quotation of parts of the works (in whatever context) entirely unproblematic. Little attention in any of the writings about the pamphlets is given to the materiality of these texts, the matter of the words themselves and the surface upon which they are inscribed, the printed page. To read the original pamphlets is a very different experience from reading about them. The dialogue between the reader and a copy of Bagatelles pour un massacre is one beyond words. The pamphlet exceeds the words that are a part of it. The words are bounded by margins, floating above and between the yellowing paper upon which they are printed. The yellow paper… yellow… a colour “associated with degradation and discredit” and also the colour associated with ageing (Connor 2004: 164). The pamphlets are growing old. The eyes that scan across the page see this discolouration, this sign of the paper in decline. The eyes see the broken corners of some pages. They register the insult of the insult of the white threads that bind the pages together, their unsettling appearance of newness. The fingers feel the textured and relatively thick paper. It is dry and fragile. There is a smell to reading that exists in excess of this feeling and seeing. There is the dry smell that bespeaks the maturity of the paper. At the moment—when Céline’s prose is read in its original type-setting—the pamphlets exist as a state of decay. They are dying. This experience of the pamphlets is lost when extracts from them are read in quotation. Citations from the pamphlets, in or out of what is perceived to be a suitable context, provide the prose with a renewal, a rejuvenation. This is where the limitations inherent in transposing Butler’s ideas onto a text like Bagatelles pour un massacre are revealed. To cut any of the text from its ageing moorings and to paste it into a publication in the present, is to smooth the wrinkles that bear testimony to its past. The print on this page, in its haecceity, in its here and nowness, obscures the original paper in its now and thenness. Butler is sensitive to this problem of reinvigoration. The one who recites hate-speech is responsible for the manner in which that repetition is carried out (1997: 27). It would seem in this instance that the responsible act

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would be not to repeat Céline’s prose. Outside the increasingly fragile pages of the pamphlets, the passages Céline composed or appropriated gain a new lease of life. It is true that they may be made to mean differently yet this attempt at reappropriation is also open to failure. The writer cannot control the response of the reader. The content of texts like those by Kaplan and Kristeva, which contain quotations from the pamphlets, may be deployed against the grain of the usage they were originally intended for (as a condemnation of fascism, or as an illustration of the psychic underpinnings of modern literature, respectively). Any citations will always exceed the parameters set around their interpretation in the present. The act of quotation, the work of repetition, always entails a loss, something is invariably left behind. This loss is what occasions the potential for resistance in repetition. The loss is necessary for there to be any hope of change. This privation at the heart of repetition should therefore usually be understood as a positive characteristic, in the case of the pamphlets however, perhaps the loss is greater than the gain. It is not only the age of the prose that becomes buried in the action of citation though. There are other forfeitures. The quotations from the pamphlets reproduced in books about Céline are likely to be unfaithful to the way the text they apparently simply reiterate actually appeared on the page. The technology of the printing press has advanced greatly since the Thirties and Forties. In 1938 the mediation of the printing process, the gap between the writer and the reproduction of his writing, created a significant possibility for errors to occur. Here error acts as a form of resistance. The printing press is supposed to repeat the writer’s words over and over again but there is always the potential for this process of reproduction to go astray. It is these strayings from the typescript that are also lost when Céline is cited in the present. The context within which the pamphlets were written was never one in which intention would be fulfilled by the end product. In the copy of Bagatelles pour un massacre which was referenced for this essay, the printed characters on the page were often imperfect.8 The “i” would sometimes occur solely as a dot, or as a line without a dot. It was either a head without a body, or a body without a head. Other letters also appeared in varying degrees of degradation. This damage was caused either by the incomplete inking of the plates during the printing process, as seems most likely, or possibly by damage to the plates themselves. To give a sense of the scale of this partial printing, on page 326 (chosen at random) the letter 8 This particular copy is held in the Special Collections section of the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds. I am grateful to the staff in Special Collections for their help and assistance.

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“i” is damaged in the words ‘tennis,’ ‘civilisation,’ ‘parfait,’ ‘animale,’ ‘Juif,’ and ‘air.’ On page 332 the end of two lines of text is missing, I underscore the missing sections: Quel théâtre pour cyclopes? …cent décors échelonnés, 9 t___plus grandioses… vers la mer… Mais il se glisse, piaule, piroue___

The citing of Bagatelles pour un massacre in the present purifies the pamphlet, excising these imperfections that are omnipresent in the original. To reproduce these incomplete passages as complete is to conceal what is a material manifestation of the gap that exists between intention and eventuality. There is an incomplete correspondence between what Céline wants to say and what is eventually said in Bagatelles pour un massacre. This resistance at the level of the matter of writing itself, the ink that refuses to collaborate with the author, is also lost when parts of the pamphlet are reprinted. An ethical reading of the work would be one which drew the reader’s attention to its physical condition (an elaboration of the contextual ethics mentioned earlier). The pamphlets exist in the present but not as they did in the past. It is important to age them, to acknowledge the changed circumstances in which they are now read. It is also equally crucial to draw attention to the way the pamphlets undermine the message they are supposed to convey, but not at the level of style, rather through the very substance out of which they are made. The damaged “i’s” draw attention to the absence of the I in the text, the lack of authority within the writing. The ink refuses to be limited by intention. This refusal in the matter that is print, matters because it highlights the possibility of refusal in general. The pamphlets are antisemitic, fascist, misogynist, and racist, but never perfectly so. The inconsistencies in the ink act as an invitation to a further contesting of the content, a rewriting of hate against itself. This would be the right response to the pamphlets. Bibliography Alméras, Philippe. (1995). “Céline’s Masquerade,” Céline and the Politics of Difference, eds. Rosemarie Scullion, Philip H. Solomon and Thomas C. Spear, Hanover: UP of New England, 64-83. —— (2000). Je suis le bouc: Céline et l’antisémitisme, Paris: Denoël. 9

“A theatre fit for Hercules? …a hundred stage-sets spread out, t___ more imposing…towards the sea…gliding, padding, piroue___” (My translation).

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Barthes, R. (1977). “The Death of the Author,” Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath, London: Fontana, 142-148. —— (1978). Leçon, Paris: Seuil. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” London: Routledge. —— (1997). Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, London: Routledge. Céline, Louis-Ferdinand (1937). Bagatelles pour un Massacre, Paris: Denoël. Chanter, Tina (2004). “The Picture of Abjection: Thomas Vinterberg’s ‘The Celebration’,” parallax 30, 10:1, 30-39. Connor, Steven (2004). The Book of Skin, Ithaca: Cornell UP. Creed, Barbara (1993). The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge. Ferguson, James (1999). Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt, Berkeley: U of California P. Foucault, Michel. (1998). “What is an Author?” Aesthetics: The Essential Work 2, ed. James Faubion, London: Lane. —— (2001). Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard, London: Routledge. Godard, Henri (1998). Céline scandale, Paris: Gallimard. Gustafson, Susan E. (1995). Absent Mothers and Orphaned Fathers: Narcissism and Abjection in Lessing’s Aesthetic and Dramatic Production, Detroit: Wayne State UP. Hewitt, Nicholas (1999). The Life of Céline: A Critical Biography, Oxford: Blackwell. Kaplan, Alice Yaeger (1986). Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. —— (1995). “Sources and Quotations in Céline’s Bagatelles pour un Massacre,” Céline and the Politics of Difference, eds. Rosemarie Scullion, Philip H. Solomon and Thomas C. Spear, Hanover: UP of New England, 29-46. Kristeva, Julia (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia UP. —— (1996). Interviews, ed. Ross Mitchell Guberman, New York: Columbia UP. Lacan, Jacques (1977). “The Mirror Stage,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Routledge, 1-7. Ockman, Carol (1995). Ingres’ Eroticized Bodies: Retracing the Serpentine Line, New Haven: Yale UP.

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Oliver, Kelly (1993). Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-bind, Bloomington: Indiana UP. Stone, Judith (1983). “The Horrors of Power: A Critique of Kristeva,” The Politics of Theory, eds. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen and Diane Loxley, Cochester: U of Essex, 38-48. Valier, Claire (2002). “Punishment, Border Crossings and the Powers of Horror,” Theoretical Criminology, 6:3, 319-337.

THE GROTESQUE ON FLESHING OUT THE SUBJECT OF ETHICS SARA COHEN SHABOT This essay asks what kind of ethics we would obtain if we conceptualize the subject as a grotesque subject, constituted by a grotesque body. Cohen Shabot argues that the grotesque subject, provided with a grotesque body, constitutes a clearly material, concrete subject, which in turn emphasizes elements such as hybridity, plurality, excess, waste, openness and a constant connection between itself and the world, between itself and its others. Cohen Shabot claims that if we accept Foucault’s idea that bodies are created by power and that, at at the same time, they constitute a way to resist and create new forms of power, we can relate to the grotesque subject as lending itself to a new way of conceiving a resistant subjectivity, opposed to classical and modernist ideas of subjectivity and to the ethics which derives from either ideal.

There is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination. J.M. Coetzee Independence is a political term. Life does not know independence, only coexistence: whether pacific or violent, whether synthetic or disruptive, there is only coextensive, coeval, coarising all around. To forget this constitutive conjunction is a political and ethical choice. It is a ‘decision’ in the most radical sense: that is, a cutting, a dividing, a de-termination which parses the world into disjunctive realms. Ed Cohen The grotesque unfinished and open body (dying, bringing forth and being born) is not separated from the world by clearly defined boundaries; it is blended with the world, with animals, with objects. It is cosmic, it represents the entire material bodily world in all its elements. Mikhail Bakhtin

Is it really possible to put our selves in the other’s position? If so, how relevant is this step in the process of developing an ethics and in becoming moral subjects? In her discussion of Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999), Marjorie Garber elaborates a possible interpretation of Coetzee’s text in

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which The Lives of Animals seems to be mainly a text on the value of literature, that is, on the value of language and metaphors, of poetic imagination, rather than a text on animals (1999: 73-84). Taking Garber’s reading as a point of departure Coetzee can be seen as an author for whom the poetic imagination, the power to imagine ourselves other than we are, and to think by way of literature and metaphors constitutes a basic pre-requisite of being moral, of being ethical subjects. Otherwise, why would Coetzee present the poetic imagination in his book as an alternative to philosophical thought, or, more bluntly put, why would he not rather write, instead of a novel, a philosophical text, which is the more common, more expected thing to do when trying to engage in a debate and argue for or against certain ideas, as Coetzee clearly does in The Lives of Animals? Coetzee is not, of course, the first author to opt for literature to present philosophical arguments instead of writing a more traditional philosophical treatise. In fact, the tendency to use literature as a mode of philosophical intervention has developed widely mainly within the last century through, for instance, philosophers such as Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir and, more recently, Derrida, Cixous, and Irigaray. Nevertheless, I think that the same thing that has been said about Coetzee’s text, may also be said about writings by these other philosophers: when writing philosophy as literature, there can be no doubt that, aside from the value of the posed argument itself, something very important is being said about the power of literature and of the poetic imagination in creating or in giving life and making a philosophical argument true. In the specific case of Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, then, what is being said in this regard is that the degree to which we can be moral subjects is directly connected to the degree to which we can imagine ourselves in the position of the other. This process of using the imagination, though, cannot— in Coetzee’s eyes be a pure philosophical process but rather it has to be a poetic, literary process, necessarily inhabited by metaphors and literary figures (Garber 1999: 73-84). I would like to base this essay on a slightly amplified or a more radical version of Coetzee’s theory regarding the intimate connections between ethics and aesthetics, between the possibility of being moral subjects and the imperative of imagining poetically. Thus, I would like to argue not only for the importance of imagining ourselves in the position of the other when trying to be moral subjects, but, more radically, I would like to argue that imagining ourselves always already as others in ourselves might enhance the possibilities of our becoming moral subjects, truly and deeply committed to our own destiny and to that of the other.

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The way in which we define our own subjectivity, the way in which we describe our being-in-the world, is of cardinal importance when defining and describing the ethical relations among subjects. Foucault argued, in several of his works, that subjects are not given, but made, and that these subjects are always embodied subjects, products of specific historical situations and social practices which invest these embodied subjects with the power to act and to think and behave in certain ways.1 Taking this Foucauldian idea as point of departure, we could go further and say that the fashion in which embodied subjects are created, that is, the specific contents and forms with which powers invest such subjectivities, constitute in fact one of the most meaningful elements within the development of an ethical theory: if subjects are made, if they are a product of history, culture and society, we should ask why they are constructed in a certain fashion and not differently, and we should be aware that epistemological, aesthetic and—most importantly— ethical values are at stake when answering this question. Thus, it seems that ethical positions participate in a de facto manner in the construction of any specific kind of subjectivity and that there are, consequently, important ethical consequences to the way subjectivities are constructed. I will argue that an ethical theory cannot be truly understood without a previous comprehension of the kind of subjectivity that it is based on. Moreover, I will argue that a specific way of conceptualizing subjectivity, in this case the subject conceptualized as grotesque, might contribute to the development of a complex, rich and positively ambiguous ethics. In the following, I will propose the grotesque subject as presenting a figuration, a position or inherent ethos through which the subject as it has been conceived mainly by phenomenological and postmodern theories might be better understood and exemplified. Later on, I will deal with some of the ethical consequences this conceptualization of the subject as grotesque might carry, attempting to draw, through this, the ethical picture that could derive and develop out of a subjectivity conceived as grotesque. Phenomenology, Postmodernity and the Critique of the Subject Phenomenology and, later on, postmodern theoretical thought, have carried out a deep critique of the concept of the subject and its identity as it appears in different classical and modern philosophical theories. The new subject that phenomenology and postmodern thought try to present is above all created as a consequence of its being-with-others, thus, intersubjectivity turns out to be 1

See, for example, Foucault, 1977: 25, 27, 212; 1982; 1984.

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one of the key concepts needed in order to understand this construction of the subject’s identity. Consequently the subject must be understood as constantly re-emerging from its intersection with the world outside itself and with others. A monolithic, closed, immutable Cartesian subjectivity is no longer possible. This new subject is an embodied subject, and it is also a subject that is historically, socially and culturally defined. It is the subject that this chapter will exemplify and explain through the figuration of the grotesque. Phenomenology and postmodern philosophy, in general, can be analyzed in a new way by looking at them from the perspective of the figuration of the grotesque. This can be done by showing how the new subject proposed by these philosophies may be better understood by comparing it to the grotesque subject. I argue that the grotesque figuration succeeds in presenting the subject the way phenomenology and postmodern thought has tried to, namely, as embodied, as strongly rooted in concreteness and as clearly intertwined with the world and the others. The Grotesque Subject and the Problem of Representation The grotesque has been described, by its different analysts, as a concept which—referring originally to visual art—mainly addresses bodies and concrete subjects.2 The grotesque bodies are hybrid bodies,3 a mixture of animals, objects, plants and human beings. This is the reason why the grotesque has been recognized as a concept pointing to monstrosity,4 irrational-confusion 5 or absurd,6 and deformed-heterogeneity.7 C. J. Jung, for instance, describes a mythological-grotesque character, the Trickster, as follows: God, man and animal at once. He is both sub-human and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is unconsciousness. […] He is so unconscious of himself that his body is not a unity, and his two hands fight each other. He takes his anus off and entrust it with a special task. Even his sex is optional despite his phallic qualities: he can 2

Cf. Bakhtin, 1965; Harpham, 1982; Kayser, 1963; Kuryluk, 1987; Thomson, 1972; Yates, 1997. 3 Cf. Kuryluk, 1987: 17, 75, 76, 319; Harpham, 1982: 11, 21, 62; Thomson, 1972: 50; Yates, 1997: 16. 4 Cf. Cohen, 1996; Garland Thomson, 1996; Harpham, 1982: 8; Kuryluk, 1987: 302; Luther Adams, 1997; Wright, 1968: xxx; Yates, 1997: 7. 5 Cf. Clayborough, 1965; Wright, 1968: x. 6 Cf. Kayser, 1963: 37, 53, 184-188; Yates, 1997: 18. 7 Cf. Kuryluk, 1987: 303, 304; Thomson, 1972: 26, 27; Yates, 1997: 42, 44, 55-56.

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turn himself into a woman and bear children. From his penis he makes all kinds of useful plants. This is a reference to his original nature as a Creator, for the world is made from the body of a god. (quoted in Harpham 1982: 53; emphasis added)

Another illustrative example of a grotesque character can be found in a fragment of classic literature, when Ovid describes Scylla, who is poisoned by Circe, her enemy: There Scylla came; she waded into the water, Waist-deep, and suddenly saw her loins disfigured With barking monsters, and at first she could not Believe that these were parts of her own body. She tried to drive them off, the barking creatures, And flees in panic, but what she runs away from She still takes with her; feeling for her thighs, Her legs, her feet, she finds, in all these parts, The heads of dogs, jaws gaping wide, and hellish. She stands on dogs gone mad, and loins and belly Are circled by those monstrous forms. (quoted in Harpham 1982: 16; emphasis added)

The grotesque subject, provided with such embodied and open subjectivity, is unrepresentable or unknowable by way of any normal system of knowledge or representation, that is, by any system governed by rational principles, and which in consequence looks for a clear framing of its object of research. As such, the grotesque subject becomes a clear example of phenomenological and postmodern conceptualizations of the embodied subject. Grotesque bodies are totally opposed to the classical bodies represented, for instance, during the Renaissance: grotesque bodies are not clean, closed, well-defined, clear-cut, beautiful bodies striving for symmetry and order.8 The grotesque body is the “uncanny” body par excellence, a body which defies clear definitions and borders: it is in the middle ground between death and life,9 between subject and object and between one and many.10 Its 8

On grotesque bodies as opposed to the classic bodies represented during the Renaissance, see Bakhtin, 1965: 24-25. 9 On the grotesque as uncanny, as in-between life and death, see Thomson, 1972: 35; Kuryluk, 1987: 318. 10 This should be understood as a consequence of the grotesque hybridity and of its conflictive essence. On the Grotesque as conflict, see Harpham, 1982: 45; Thomson, 1972: 11, 18, 20, 60; Wright, 1968: xxxviii; Yates, 1997: 44-45.

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ambiguity is obvious: it is not one single body, but, simultaneously, not lost in the homogeneity of an undifferentiated wholeness. The grotesque body (as described by Mikhail Bakhtin, for example) is a differentiated body, but which, at the same time, remains intensively connected to the world and to its others. Such an exceeding body,11 which constantly outgrows itself and escapes from its own skin, constitutes a body that cannot be framed. The exceeding body cannot be contained absolutely, that is, it cannot be disconnected from the rest of the world or from its others. It finds itself in a constant and intensive intertwining and intermingling with its outside. The grotesque body grounds its connection to the world on the very condition of human subjects: the embodied subject is, in itself, open, fragmented and connected to the world and to others: The grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on the apertures or the convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking and defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body. […] This specially strikes the eye in the archaic grotesque. (Bakhtin 1965: 26; emphasis added)

It is precisely this figuration of the grotesque body that helps to ground the subject in corporeality and in gender—though the gender identity is ambiguous —that in fact protects this subject from becoming a neutral, desexualized (or hyper-sexualized) subject. This kind of grounding in fleshedspecificity protects the grotesque subject from a possible escape from embodied existence and corporeality altogether, which is present in classic and modern—including specifically Cartesian—representations of the subject, and even in some well-intentioned postmodern figurations, as in some cases, that of the cyborg.12 11 Excess is a central feature of the grotesque. On the grotesque as essentially excessive, see Bakhtin, 1965: 320- 321; Harpham, 1982: 31; Kuryluk, 1987: 302; Thomson, 1972: 38-39. 12 I am referring here to science-fiction representations of the cyborg which tend, even if not in a clearly intentional way, to try to escape the “fleshed-body,” and to become—as in classical and modern representations of the subject—a “pure mind.”

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This kind of embodied existence presents an ontological picture which points to a plurality within totality, that is, an image of reality which stresses interconnectedness and unity (the grotesque subject as open to the world, intertwined with it), but which at the same time also emphasizes difference, heterogeneity and multiplicity; the grotesque subject is hybrid and plural, open to the world but still a subject, as it does not lose itself in the world. This ontological picture is clearly and essentially intersubjective. The grotesque world constitutes an ambiguous, mixed reality, which can easily cause anxiety. It is a fragmentary and complex reality, plagued by multiple relations and in which clear hierarchical relations derived from welldefined binary oppositions, are not viable. Having this picture of the grotesque bodies and the grotesque world in mind, we can understand the grotesque ontology as described above, namely, as an ontology that embraces change, fluidity and disorder. Such a picture of the world, i.e. way of describing ontological existence subsequently results in, I argue, an epistemology which is best characterized by a clear incapacity to represent and be represented through classic means of representation. If reality is in fact fragmentary, non-homogeneous, hybrid, fluid and constantly changing, then, it will be impossible to represent it (to know it) at least through the use of tools belonging to the systematic, logic and discursiverational thought. How could it be possible to frame and capture a reality which is essentially contradictory, deformed and framed only by blurred, highly permeable boundaries? Such a reality cannot be represented or known by an Identity Thought (a thought which negates everything that exceeds the law of identity), nor through any system—given that a system is, in principle, always framing and thus immobilizing. Moreover, one of the most important features of a rational system of thought is to clean the object of study from its excesses, that is, from what is not necessary for such an object to have or to be. This is the philosophical move par excellence, evident in, for example, Okham’s Razor, which calls for an elimination of all which is not absolutely necessary within a system, and which is a major principle within philosophical thought. The grotesque, then, will allow representation and knowledge only by means of deformation, intersubjective hybridity and excess. This kind of epistemology shows, paradoxically, the impossibility of representation or the impossibility of knowledge through an all-encompassing-system, a system

On this phenomena, see for instance the analysis of Doane, 1999; Sofia, 1999; Springer, 1999.

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that can absorb and contain all, without leaving any residues, without polluting itself, so to speak, with any redundant excesses. Ambiguity and the “Supplementary Representation of Reality” One more reason why the grotesque and grotesque ontology is unrepresentable by means of a philosophical system is its ambiguous essence, its constantly being in-between.13 This fact prevents the grotesque from possibly being explained by any binary divides: the in-between is the middle ground that cannot be contained by a concept and its opposite. From this perspective, the grotesque may be seen as similar to the Derridean Undecidable (1972: 42-43), which never really belongs to any clear frame, not even to the one proposed by dialectics. The grotesque will be better understood, then, as a demand for an epistemology that searches for a supplementary representation of reality. By “supplementary” I understand, again, a Derridean conceptualization of being and knowledge as opposed to hierarchies and binary systems. A supplementary representation of reality points, as the grotesque does, to a fragmentary reality where parts are added one to another, integrated into each other, but that never complete one another. In other words, there is no original core or main essence that is completed by marginal sub-parts. Every fragment of the grotesque world is independent in the sense that it does not lack anything and does not have to be completed. Each element is irreducible to any other. This is mainly due to the fact that excess and residues are an integral part of the grotesque world. If the excess cannot be cleaned out, this means that there is no possibility of abstraction, of reductive thought where some parts are contained by others, broader and more abstract than they are in themselves. Particularity and concreteness cannot be erased, since they are precisely the ones giving meaning to the grotesque. Thus, grotesque elements cannot be summarized and reduced to their relevant elements. This means that one cannot be abolished by means of the other. Every element in the grotesque world is equally essential or equally marginal, and this is also what does not allow the grotesque to name things (and to represent them by names). When accidents are not differentiated from essences, then naming— which definitely functions as an essence/accident differentiation tool—cannot work. Consequently, the grotesque subject cannot be fully identified or

13

On the grotesque as being “in-between” see note 10 on the grotesque as conflict and hybrid. See also Cohen, 1997; Harpham, 1982: 53.

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named (it is not a human, nor a plant, nor an animal, it is neither male nor female; neither one nor many). The Grotesque: An Embracing Figuration In sum, the ontology and epistemology presented by the grotesque essentially deal with difference in the sense of concreteness, specificity, particularity and irreducibility to general principles. The reality represented by the grotesque emphasizes at the same time interconnectedness and heterogeneity; it emphasizes intersubjectivity. This means that the grotesque figuration functions as an instance of phenomenological and postmodern ontologies and epistemologies. Moreover, I argue that other figurations that have been used in order to flesh out phenomenology and postmodern thought are in fact contained by the figuration of the grotesque. Clearly, the monstrous and the abnormal—which have often been used to describe the postmodern condition—are at the core of the ethos of the grotesque.14 Nietzsche, for example, described the Dyonisian world as provided from clearly grotesque features (1967: 549-550) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty theorized in similar terms the world as flesh, which constitutes a central concept in phenomenology, and which can also be seen clearly as a concept preceding the postmodern description of an intersubjective reality (1968: 137). The Deleuzian rhizome may also be seen as contained within the grotesque description of the world.15 It is also possible to identify, within the space of the grotesque, the features of Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic subject (1994: 4) and other important conceptualizations of the postmodern such as the queer subject (Butler 1999) and the cyborg (Haraway, 1991). As we have seen, the grotesque deals with the many implications of excess (a concept 14 On monstrosity and abnormality as postmodern features, see Cohen, 1997; Foucault, 2000; Garland Thomson, 1996; Grosz, 1996; Stacey, 1997. 15 “The second kind is very different, molecular and of the ‘rhizome’ type. The diagonal frees itself, breaks or twists. The line no longer forms a contour, and instead passes between things, between points. It belongs to a smooth space. It draws a plane that has no more dimensions than that which crosses it; therefore the multiplicity it constitutes is no longer subordinated to the One, but takes on a consistency of its own. These are multiplicities of masses or packs, not of classes; anomalous and nomadic multiplicities, not normal or legal ones; multiplicities of becoming, or transformational multiplicities, not countable elements and ordered relations; fuzzy, not exact aggregates, etc. At the level of pathos, these multiplicities are expressed by psychosis and especially schizophrenia. At the level of pragmatics, they are utilized by sorcery” (Deleuze, Guattari, 1988: 505-506).

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which has been explored as a postmodern figuration by Georges Bataille (1985: 97)), and it is also the terrain par excellence of Julia Kristeva’s abjection: “It is not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (1982: 4; emphasis added). Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, and the Ethics of Ambiguity The grotesque ethics is mainly an ethics of ambiguity. This is why it is helpful to present it linked to other attempts to recognize ambiguity as central to an ethical and a philosophical project. Simone de Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity, outlined mainly, but not only, in her book The Ethics of Ambiguity, was greatly influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of ambiguity, mostly developed in his The Phenomenology of Perception and later on in his last, unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible.16 Both Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir considered ambiguity the central element of a phenomenological and existentialist description of reality and of the relations of individuals among themselves and the world they inhabit. At the basis of both Merleau-Ponty’s and Beauvoir’s philosophical projects is the idea that there are no clear-cut divisions between humans as embodied subjects and the rest of the world. Our being intimately, carnally mingled, intertwined with the world, constitutes the root of our ambiguous existence, and shapes our epistemological and our ethical conditions. It is our situation as embodied subjects that connects us ineluctably with other subjects, objects, and the world as a whole. As Merleau-Ponty puts it: Now why would this generality [Sentient and Sensible], which constitutes the unity of my body, not open it to other bodies? The handshake too is reversible; I can feel myself touched as well and at the same time as touching. […] Why would not the synergy exist among different organisms, if it is possible within each? Their landscapes interweave, their actions and their passions fit together exactly: this is possible as we no longer make belongingness to one same “consciousness” the primordial definition of sensibility, and as soon as we rather understand it as the return of the visible upon itself, a carnal adherence of the sentient to the sensed and of the sensed to the sentient. For, as overlapping and fission, identity and difference, it brings to birth a ray of natural light that illuminates all flesh and not only my own. (1968: 142; emphasis added) 16

On Merleau-Ponty’s and Beauvoir’s mutual influence see for instance Heinamaa, 2003a; Heinamaa, 2003b; Langer, 2003.

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Thus, we are basically ambiguous: we are subjects and objects at the same time, “touching” and “touched,” “sentient” and “sensible.” We are in the world, but we are not the world: we are temporal, finite—which constitutes in itself, according to Beauvoir, a necessary condition for being moral. I will return to this later. In contrast, the world will keep existing when we are gone (Beauvoir, 1948: 12-22). We are fleshed subjects, who relate to the world, to objects and other subjects, by way of our embodied subjectivities, through our carnal eroticism and sexuality, through our ineludible fleshed existence. “Unlike pure consciousness,” says Monika Langer, paraphrasing MerleauPonty and Beauvoir, “we ‘blend’ with, and compose, a common situation— an intersubjectivity. Further, we feel the need for others’ recognition” (2003: 101). Being flesh, then, is what allows us to be part of the world, to be materially and concretely part of it. Also, this is what in fact allows us to be subjects open to others and to the other’s concrete, specific situation; we share our carnality and, consequently, we are also able to share our condition of being alive and, at the same time, of being mortal. Had we been “pure consciousness,” with no body (a kind of Cartesian or Platonic ideal), we would be a totally different kind of being, a kind of god, who, among other things, would not have any need for ethics. This is precisely Beauvoir’s point when she describes the main character of her novel All Men are Mortal, Fosca, a man who has revealed he is immortal. On this Barbara S. Andrew comments: Immortality allows Fosca to stand outside human reality. He cannot risk his life for a cause or dedicate himself to loving one person. He will live forever; his life cannot be risked, his beloved will be left. He forgets the significance of others’ existence, the importance of each individual’s freedom. And so he forgets where value springs from, and he is no longer part of the human world. His own freedom no longer has meaning. As such, he views himself outside morality. He is surely outside an embodied ethic. He is also outside ambiguity, because the limitations of his bodily existence are no longer meaningful. Thus he cannot participate in making meaning. (2003: 36-37; emphasis added)

Both for Merleau-Ponty and for Beauvoir, being embodied subjects, open through our bodies to the world and to others, constitutes an absolutely necessary condition for being the human beings that we are and for being moral human beings, creatures in need of an ethics to behave according to. Thus, following Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir, we could say that losing the flesh-and-blood body would mean a return to the Cartesian subject, a subject that can separate herself from her mind, and that, as a consequence, maybe even could throw her body away. To think about ourselves as possible disembodied creatures, irremediably brings with itself a feeling of

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omnipotence that makes us forget the most meaningful experiences of human life, those that make us the historical, cultural and social creatures with existential worries and questionings that we actually are. Such experiences are precisely the corporeal ones—the pleasant, such as the enjoyment of food, moving our bodies, having sex or dancing; and also the painful, such as sickness, growing old and, finally, dying. These are all embodied experiences that constitute our phenomenological being-in-the-world (avoiding them may mean avoiding pain, but it also certainly means avoiding life itself). Avoiding or escaping from the fleshed body means leaving behind all the elements that constitute the embodied existence. Moreover, it seems that imagining ourselves as Platonic ideals, transcendent incorporeal beings, might bring with itself the danger of giving legitimacy to the undertaking of a struggle to achieve perfect beings, a struggle that can be so easily associated with fascist or racist ideologies. Embodied existence describes our way of being in the world. We are situated in the world as embodied subjects and it is through our bodies that we participate in the world of objects and of other subjects. This is the reason why, if we want to propose a figuration that represents our experience of being in the world, we must search for figurations that successfully express our presence and our situation in this world as incarnated subjects. This means we must search for a figuration to describe subjectivity as formed by the elements which can be seen as inherent in embodied existence and its being in the world. Such an embodied subjectivity is and should be described, for instance, as gendered, mutable, and perishable. In order to avoid describing this ambiguous subjectivity through old and obsolete philosophical paradigms, which made of the subject an abstract concept, alienated from his/her body, and from the rest of the world— through the artificial, arbitrary binary divides mind/body and subject/object—a new figuration should present incarnated beings as open to the world and, above all, as de facto provided with an ambiguous existence. We are in the world, our boundaries are blurred, our bodies are open. There is no true division between ourselves and the world. We are, as Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir state, ambiguous beings, hybrid creatures, subjects and objects at the same time, inseparable from the different scenarios in which we act. We are also ambiguous beings regarding our ways of existing: our gender, our looks and our thoughts constitute an ever-changing flux that can never be absolutely defined or contained by an abstract, purely conceptual, incorporeal subjectivity. This is the reason why any figuration that desires to present such an ambiguous being, must try to avoid, above all, a return to forms of being that escape or deny the body and its imperfect features. I propose the grotesque body as a figuration that may represent such an embodied,

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ambiguous, hybrid, open and permanently changing subjectivity. The grotesque body expresses a perfect description of the non-closed human subjectivity, of the open and connected-to-others embodied subject. On this, Bakhtin’s commentaries on grotesque bodies appear, again, as highly illustrative. Bakhtin describes the grotesque body as an “unfinished and open body” which is “blended with the world, with animals, with objects” (1965: 26-27). The grotesque body constitutes, for Bakhtin, “the most vivid expression of the body as not impenetrable but open” (1965: 339). Towards a Grotesque Ethics I see the grotesque as a new and unexplored paradigm of intersubjective reality and of difference. The creation of a grotesque philosophy would mean the creation of a philosophy of difference and intersubjectivity. The figuration of the grotesque and of the grotesque subject clearly emphasizes elements which are opposed to the logic of the Same, to a way of thinking that privileges the original, the essential, the true, above the copy, the exceeding or the fake. The grotesque presents the possibility of creating a new epistemology, whose uniqueness of which is reflected in its capacity for knowing reality on the one side as whole, interconnected, intertwined and total, and on the other as plural, heterogenic, dynamic, fluid and changing. The grotesque has the power to portray reality as an intertwined, intersubjective totality and, at the same time, as absolute difference. This can be explained by the fact that even though the grotesque constantly plays with mixture, distortion and intermingling, it is never lost in total confusion; it does not ever become homogeneous. The grotesque reality is always heterogeneous, always differentiated. George Santayana expresses precisely this idea when defining the concept of the grotesque: until the new object impresses its form on our imagination, so that we can grasp its unity and proportion, it appears to us as a jumble and distortion of other forms. If this confusion is absolute, the object is simply null; it does not exist aesthetically, except by virtue of its materials. But if the confusion is not absolute, and we have an inkling of the unity and character in the midst of the strangeness of the form, then we have the grotesque. It is the half-formed, the perplexed, and the suggestively monstrous (quoted in Harpham 1982: 15; emphasis added).

This new grotesque epistemology, I argue, might function as the basis of a particular, radical and phenomenological ethical approach.

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A grotesque thinking makes use of multiple characteristics in order to build systems which present the subject as necessarily embodied and its relation to others as non-hierarchical and non-binary. Within this grotesque context, as I formerly explained, the subject’s relations to others are based on complete heterogeneity and difference, but clear boundaries between essential and marginal cannot be drawn within them. Consequently, clear hierarchical relations, that usually precede domination relations, cannot be imposed within these relations. This is one of the central points of departure for a grotesque ethics. The degree to which we can be moral subjects is directly connected to the degree to which we can imagine ourselves in the position of the other. This process of using the imagination, though, cannot be a pure philosophical process but it rather has to be a poetic, literary process, necessarily inhabited by metaphors and literary figures. I argued that the grotesque might function as such a figure of imagination, which allows us to be the other, and even to be others to ourselves. The way we imagine ourselves is a political and an ethical choice, with ethical and political consequences. We can choose to imagine ourselves differently. Imagining ourselves not as closed, stable, rigid, unchangeable individuals, limited and separated from the rest of the world with clear boundaries, but rather as open, hybrid, plural, intertwined with the world, grotesque creatures, might construct us as complex and rich ethical beings. The grotesque moral persons will think of themselves already as others in themselves, as plagued with difference, heterogeneity, excesses and multiplicity, as intimately intertwined with the world they are part of. Imagining, constantly (re)creating ourselves in the grotesque manner, might help us to accept more easily our own deformities, our own defects and excesses, as well as those of the others. Imagining ourselves as grotesque figures, might save us from the struggle for perfection and from the willing to destroy or annihilate ours and, mainly, other’s difference(s). I believe, lastly, that grotesizing ourselves could get us closer to the existentialist ethical ideal according to which each other desires the freedom of the other. In de Beauvoir’s words: “Only the freedom of others keeps each one of us from hardening in the absurdity of facticity” (1948: 71). As grotesque, as being radically intertwined with the flesh of the other, we will definitely fight for the other’s freedom, since it will be our own freedom—our own flesh—that will be at stake.

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Conclusion The grotesque thinking is strongly opposed to any philosophy of the Same, to any philosophy which privileges presence, logos or being over non-identical, perishable or mutable phenomena. No unique criteria, no metaphysical logos will serve as the principle by which every difference and accidental presence will be measured and considered as normal and proper, or as abnormal and improper. The grotesque position or philosophy and, in consequence, the grotesque ethics is, above all, a philosophy and an ethics of difference. The figuration of the grotesque privileges embodiment above disembodied consciousness and excess and hybridity above clean, measured, well equilibrated and perfectly defined spaces. This privileging of embodiment, excess and hybridity is what essentially connects the grotesque with singularity, heterogeneity and difference. It is the body, and its excesses, that composes the site par excellence of absolute difference. The body functions as the individuation principle, as the clearest principle of particularity and singularity. It is the body which constitutes us as singular beings and draws the limits within the particular minds which, according to the majority of classic and modern Western philosophers, are essentially the same for all individuals. Emphasizing the embodied nature of subjectivity means emphasizing the temporary, the accidental, the finite; it means a return to the historical, to the contextual, to the cultural. Thus, an embodied subjectivity appears as the paradigm of the anti-philosophical when the philosophical is understood as an attempt to represent “the Same,” i.e. the eternal, the universal, the general and the a-historical. The excesses of the body (and excesses in general) also constitute an important way of representing difference, and they are an important element of the grotesque figuration or position. The excess is that which is cleaned or eliminated when we try to overcome difference. The need for erasing excess has been overwhelmingly present in philosophy.17 The grotesque is plagued 17

Several important Western philosophers deal with concepts which made obvious their interest for erasing excess, for clarifying concepts and for getting rid of all which was not absolutely necessary for their system of thought. Plato’s main task in his dialogues was, for example, that of clarifying concepts that appeared to be blurred or ambiguous. Descartes introduced the concept of “clear and distinct ideas,” which turned to be a basic concept not only for his philosophy but also for most of the philosophical thought after him. Also Spinoza pretended to erase all excess when he tried to create his system of ethics, rigged by geometry principles, and Kant’s Categorical Imperative presents the same characteristics when it emphasizes the necessity of getting rid of all which might interfere with the rational decision of making the good. Some postmodern philosophers have criticized this tendency.

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with excess, and, consequently, it is plagued with difference. The excessive constitutes the concrete and the irreducible par excellence. Neither philosophy nor science can abstract, reduce or generalize excess, since excess is, by definition, resistant to reduction. There is no way to deal with difference, heterogeneity and otherness except by renouncing the aim of reaching the eternal and absolute, of reaching a-historical and universal abstract knowledge. Dealing with the particular, the irreducible, the accidental and the finite, as the grotesque does, means dealing with difference. That which exceeds us, that which threatens our sameness, our normality, our well-defined and protected presence in the world, constitutes the different. It is precisely this alterity, this absolute otherness into which, at the same time, we are totally immersed and from which in fact we obtain our existential meaning—the one which I propose can be made tangible, made flesh through the figuration of the grotesque. Bibliography Andrew, Barbara S. (2003). “Beauvoir’s Place in Philosophical Thought,” The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Claudia Card, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 36-37. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1965). Rabelais and His World, Cambridge: The MIT Press. Bataille, Georges (1985). Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Manchester: Manchester UP. Beauvoir, Simone de (1948). The Ethics of Ambiguity, Secaucus, NJ: Citadel. Braidotti, Rosi (1994). Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York: Columbia UP. Butler, Judith (1999). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Clayborough, Arthur (1965). The Grotesque in English Literature, Oxford: Clarendon. Coetzee, J.M. (1999). The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann, Princeton: Princeton UP.

Bataille, for instance, develops his Heterological Theory of Knowledge basically by going against this philosophical obsession of purifying thought from residues (1985: 97).

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Cohen, Ed (2001). “Poesis, Autopoesis, Autopoethics,” Culture Machine 3 [online]. Available from: http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/ Cmach/ Backissues/j003/Articles/Edcohen.htm [accessed April 17, 2005]. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome (1996). “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” Monster Theory Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 3-25. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari (1988). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London: Athlone. Derrida, Jacques (1972). Positions, London: Athlone. Doane, Mary Ann (1999). “Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine,” Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, ed. Jenny Wolmark. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 20-33. Foucault, Michel (2000). Los Anormales: Curso en el College de France (1974-1975), Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Economica. —— (1984). “Truth and Power,” The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, New York: Pantheon Books, 51-75. —— (1982). “The Subject and Power,” Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Brighton: Harvester, 208-228. —— (1977). Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of Prison, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Garber, Marjorie (1999). “Reflections,” J. M. Coetzee The Lives of Animals, ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton UP, 73-84. Garland Thomson, Rosemarie (1996). “Introduction: From Wonder to Error– A Genealogy of Freak Discourse in Modernity,” Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, New York: New York UP, 1-22. Grosz, Elizabeth (1996). “Intolerable Ambiguity: Freak as/at the Limit,” Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, New York: New York UP, 55-68. Haraway, Donna J. (1991). “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminist in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association, 149-181. Harpham, Geoffrey G. (1982). On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature, Princeton: Princeton UP. Heinamaa, Sara (2003 a). “The Body as Instrument and as Expression,” The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Claudia Card, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 66-86. —— (2003b). Towards a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Kayser, Wolfgang (1963). The Grotesque in Art and Literature, Indiana: Indiana UP. Kristeva, Julia (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia UP. Kuryluk, Ewa (1987). Salome and Judas in the Cave of Sex, Evanston: Northwestern UP. Langer, Monika (2003). “Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty on Ambiguity,” The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Claudia Card, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 87-106. Luther Adams, James (1997). “The Grotesque and Our Future,” The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections, ed. James Luther Adams and Wilson Yates, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 69-74. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1968). The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston: Northwestern UP. —— (1962). Phenomenology and Perception, London: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1967). The Will to Power, New York: Random. Sofia, Zoe (1999). “Virtual Corporeality: A Feminist View,” Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, ed. Jenny Wolmark, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 55-68. Springer, Claudia (1999). “The Pleasure of the Interface,” Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, ed. Jenny Wolmark, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 34-54. Stacey, Jackie (1997). Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer, London: Routledge. Thomson, Philip (1972). The Grotesque, London: Methuen. Wright, Thomas (1968). A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art, New York: Ungar. Yates, Wilson, (1997). “An Introduction to the Grotesque: Theoretical and Theological Considerations,” The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections, eds. James Luther Adams and Wilson Yates, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1-68.

PLAYING BALL WITH GOD: BREAKING THE LAW IN BREAKING THE WAVES BECKY MCLAUGHLIN McLaughlin’s essay compares filmmaker Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves to a philosophical treatise that attempts to teach us how to behave as ethical subjects. She argues that von Trier’s Bess takes up the same ethical stance as Sophocles’ Antigone, willingly making the journey into the realm of at (Gr. ruin, folly, delusion) in order to honor the man she loves. What is at stake in both von Trier’s film and Sophocles’ drama is the integrity and sacredness of the beloved’s body. In both cases, powerless, young women defy the leaders of their community, representatives of the word and/or the law, putting their own bodies on the line in order to preserve, protect, or heal the body of another. While Bess’ actions, like Antigone’s, appear to be self-destructive or mad, they cannot be reduced to the unethical or the irrational.

The Computer, the Unconscious, and the Affective Response In an interview with Stig Björkman, filmmaker Lars von Trier mentions the difficulty he encountered getting financial backing for his 1996 film, Breaking the Waves, and gives credit to a computer for the support he finally received from the European Script Fund: The readers there had been heavily criticised for their work. So to defend their activity they undertook a computer analysis of around ten of the projects they’d received. It was claimed that a computer would be able to ascertain a project’s artistic and commercial significance. And Breaking the Waves got top marks! That’s quite funny. The right ingredients were probably there: a sailor and a virgin and a romantic landscape—everything that the computer loved. (Björkman 1996: 12)

Perhaps the “right ingredients” were there, but the way von Trier mixed these ingredients received mixed reviews from human audiences. Victoria Nelson, for example, lists a number of knee-jerk responses to what she calls the film’s “paradox of warring axioms”: “Church bells ringing in heaven, how unspeakably corny! Not to mention the ‘miracle’ of Jan’s recovery, presumably as a result of Bess’ ultimate and fatal sexual adventure. Miracles

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and bells, the pastel sentimentalism of a turn-of-the-century postcard or Italian roadside shrines, an unholy alliance of 1940s Hollywood movie kitsch with organized religion—quel horror!” (Nelson 1997: 231). Although the movie generated plenty of interested viewers, it also, as Nelson remarks, “garnered a rather heated grassroots critical response that runs, ‘It’s great until the last third, which is over the top, and the ending, which is way over the top and ruins it’” (228).1 Like the unconscious, which is incapable of engaging in repression or the fear that gives rise to it, the computer responded positively to what von Trier himself calls “a curious mixture of religion and eroticism and possession” (14), a mixture that made it impossible to recruit big name actors for the leading roles. As von Trier says, “They were afraid of the nature of the film. […] The well-known actors we turned to didn’t dare put their careers on the line—for example Helena Bonham Carter pulled out of the production at the very last minute” (14). The fact that the computer loved the film’s ingredients while humans reacted negatively to them suggests something about the way the film operates on its audience and directs us toward a fruitful way of reading it. As Lacan has pointed out, the unconscious is structured like a language, but it does not indulge in the same kind of language we use in everyday interpersonal activities. Both the difference and the relationship between the two can be understood through the image of trains running along parallel tracks. One train is spoken words and the other, unconscious “thought” processes that occur at the same time as enunciated speech but function independently of it. Occasionally, one train jumps the track and collides with the other, producing what we call a slip of the tongue. While conscious thought is grounded in the realm of meaning, the unconscious has little if anything to do with meaning. What it registers, through analysis, is truth. A slip of the tongue may result in the utterance of a nonsense word, but when deciphered, this utterance may lead to a truth known only at the level of the unconscious. An astute reader of Lacan, Bruce Fink explains unconscious knowledge in this way: “The unconscious is not something one knows, but rather something that is known. What is unconscious is known unbeknownst to the ‘person’ in question: it is not something one ‘actively’, consciously grasps, but rather something which is ‘passively’ registered, inscribed, or counted. […] This kind of knowledge has no subject, nor does it need one” (Fink 1995: 23, emphasis in original). In the case of Breaking the Waves, this “unknown knowledge” was precisely the 1

I do not mean to imply that Nelson herself gives the movie a mixed review. She obviously holds the movie in high esteem.

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film’s artistic significance, a significance that was not actively or consciously ascertained but passively registered by a non-subject such as a computer. With its “paradox of warring axioms” and its “unholy alliance” of kitsch and organized religion, Breaking the Waves is a filmic slip of the tongue, and what von Trier and the computer seemed to register, which the financial backers and well-known actors did not, was something we might call the truth: that great art only comes at the price of great risk—“With every dab of paint, I risk my life,” said Cézanne—and that this movie had to be made whether careers were put on the line or not. Because the ego is always defensive, self-protective, and bent on avoiding risk, it was probably responsible for von Trier’s recruiting problems. Ultimately, however, the absence of well-known actors operated in the movie’s favor since their presence might have undercut the very thing that makes the movie work: its amateurish, home-video quality. Paradoxically, what makes the movie work is also what provokes most criticism from audiences. My film students, for example, say the movie makes them feel sea sick, and this physical effect is accompanied by an emotional affect, frustration in some cases and anger in others. Although I am no longer surprised by this kind of reaction, the first time I encountered it, I was not only surprised but dismayed. I had just seen Breaking the Waves and been deeply moved by its terrible beauty. Thus, when I asked a friend of mine whether he liked it, I was expecting to share mutual admiration for von Trier’s work. Something else happened instead. “Like it?” he snarled, his face turning an ugly red. “I hated it. It’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen! Such an amateurish use of the camera. It was like watching a badly made home video!” Because the angry critique went on and on, my friend expressing a rage that hardly seemed warranted, I felt that his response called for a more critical interrogation of the film on my part. Obviously, Breaking the Waves does not elicit a mild response from its viewers, but what puzzled me was why it had excited this kind of aggressivity in someone who seldom behaves with aggressivity, why by merely mentioning the film I had become the object of an unexpected verbal attack. After a good deal of thought and several viewings, I came to the conclusion that the film was working on him in ways he was not conscious of and that one affect was masking another, more unsettling one. A brief discussion of the psychotic may shed some light on my friend’s hostile reaction. Freud uses the image of the patch to explain the origin of the psychotic delusion: “the delusion is found applied like a patch over the place where originally a rent had appeared in the ego’s relation to the external world” (Freud 1979: 215). We can understand this rent as castration, the mark of the divided subject, a rent we all suffer, a rent that is

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paradoxically made by our insertion into the symbolic network as well as covered up or covered over by it via the acquisition of language. Because the psychotic is not properly sutured, however, he or she uses the delusion as a kind of substitute suture. But it is a substitute that does not work very well, for what it gives rise to is the aggressivity that accompanies “captation by the imago of the human form,” a form that Lacan argues is “invested with all the original distress resulting from the child’s intra-organic and relational discordance during the first six months, when he bears the signs […] of a physiological natal prematuration” (1977: 19). In analysis, images of the fragmented body often arise when the progress of the analytic work has brought about in the analysand a certain level of aggressive disintegration— that is, when the delusion ceases to work as a patch and the fabric falls apart. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that my friend is a psychotic but rather that his viewing of Breaking the Waves worked in the way of an analytic session, uncovering the rent (that is, castration) that we normally keep covered through repression (that is, the neurotic’s patch) and giving rise to a mild form of aggressive disintegration. Because the movie is precisely about our plight as castrated subjects, the sexual (non)relation, and what is at stake in real love (real in the Lacanian sense of the word), it creates anxiety that sometimes masquerades as rage and manifests itself as aggressivity. We might, then, read my friend’s response thus: in the face of his own cut, brought home to him at the level of the unconscious, he cut the film. For if we have learned nothing else from psychoanalysis, we have learned that the ego is not particularly creative. It responds as if only two possibilities exist, to annihilate or to be annihilated. Hence its defensive posture and my friend’s defensive gesture. To be more concrete, let us focus on the reason he stated for disliking Breaking the Waves: its amateurish, homemade-movie quality. Although the film insists on drawing attention to or exposing its filmic apparatus, this has the odd effect of making the events appear disturbingly realistic rather than fictional. Instead of allowing us the reassuring luxury of telling ourselves it is only a movie, just the work of someone’s imagination, its amateurish, homevideo quality suggests a documentation of real events that are being videotaped by a rather inept camera operator, perhaps an idle bystander who has simply been handed the camera and told to press the button. The viewer is made acutely aware of the materiality of the film through its grainy, slightly fuzzy texture, an occasional loss of focus that blurs faces and objects, and the frequent bobbing of the camera as if held by an unsteady hand. One might say the film continually shudders in order to show its audience how to respond, for as Jane Malmo points out, Aristotle used the Greek word phrittein to describe what happens to the spectator of a tragedy: “he is made

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to ‘shudder’. […] The spectator cannot help his response; his feeling overwhelms him, and in his shudder he expels what he cannot absorb” (1994: 81-82). The shudder describes von Trier’s editing style, too, for the transitions between shots are anything but smooth. They are sharp and jolting. They produce uneven seams, puckers, and wrinkles, not subtle linkages. In this respect, von Trier’s editing is reminiscent of Eisenstein’s. For Eisenstein, “the cinematic cut is like the rupturing of the cell when it splits in two. Editing is done at the point that a shot ‘bursts’—that is, when its tensions have reached their maximum expansion. The rhythm of editing in a movie should be like the explosions of an internal combustion engine” (Giannetti 2002: 159-160). Or the explosions of cresting and breaking waves. To make matters worse, von Trier’s film is a textual body upon which is imposed a number of markers or cuts in the form of glossy tableaus with chapter headings such as “Bess Gets Married” or “Life With Jan”—each of which operates like a label in a family photograph album. There is a tension, then, between the raw physicality of the film’s material substance and motion, and the picturesque but static artificiality of the tableaus. The use of these tableaus, or chapter headings, can be seen as an attempt to impose order on a life that exists somewhere beyond the normal social order, to make sense of an act that makes no rational sense, to contain something far bigger than the container. But while Nelson proposes that “[t]hese emblematic frames tell us exactly how to read the film” (1997: 229), one could argue that they successfully fail to tell us how to read the film’s central character, Bess McNeill, for she partakes of the “real,” a register that exists outside of or apart from our reality, that is, a register that “ex-sists” in the Heideggerian sense.2 Although the root meaning of the term in Greek is “standing outside of” or “standing apart from something,” says Fink, “it also came to be applied to states of mind that we would call ‘ecstatic’” (1995: 122). An example of the ecstatic overflow produced by Bess can be seen in moments when the film’s reality spills out into the viewer’s reality— moments when Bess looks directly into the camera, once sticking her tongue out as if in playful mockery of the camera operator and thus breaking one of the usual conventions of Hollywood filming by making the operator of the camera—and, by extension, the viewer—part of the diegesis. We are accustomed to seeing this sort of inclusive look when watching a porno flick, but even though von Trier says he had the Marquis de Sade’s Justine in mind 2

According to Fink, translators of Heidegger’s Being and Time first introduced the word “ex-sistence” into French: “Heidegger often played on the root meaning of the word, ‘standing outside’ or ‘stepping outside’ oneself, but also on its close connection in Greek with the root of the word for ‘existence’” (1995: 122).

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as he was directing Breaking the Waves, Bess is not Justine, and the film is not pornographic. Perhaps we would be more comfortable if it were, however, for what Bess gives us access to is not the jouissance of the idiot, as Lacan playfully refers to “organ pleasure,” but that Other jouissance in which “an ordinary object is elevated to the status of the Thing” (Fink 1995: 115). According to Lacan, this Other jouissance, generally associated with feminine jouissance, gets beyond neurosis via love. In love, one gives what one does not have—in Bess’ case, the inviolable body. Her body is obviously not inviolable, and yet she offers it as if it is. Her body suffers, and we see this suffering clearly registered when she vomits on the side of the road after giving a man a hand-job at the back of a bus; when her face is contorted in an agony of disgust, her lipstick smeared, her fancy hairdo knocked askew, and her red hot pants crumpled around her ankle as she couples with a man from the local pub; and when her small body is lacerated, bruised, and bleeding after her encounter with the sailors. Hers is not the body of O or any other S & M porn star, for it does not continue to look desirable during nor does it magically repair itself after each moment of abuse. It becomes more and more abject until, in an astonishing reversal of terms, it becomes sublime: a provincial, “feeble-minded” girl from northwest Scotland takes on the profoundly noble status of an Antigone.3 Perhaps the movie is “way over the top,” as Nelson’s viewers argue, but given the film’s subject matter, it could not have been constructed in any other way and still have managed to achieve such powerful results. What we call form and content are inextricably bound, the form giving meaning to the content, and the content echoing that meaning back via the form. Like the tension that exists between the film’s diegetic body and the tableaus that cut that body up, Bess’ body, which receives multiple and fatal stab wounds, is the stage upon which a violent battle between the word (representative of law and community) and the flesh (representative of justice and the individual) is enacted. She defies the word—“How can you love a word?” she asks the church elders—pitting it against the flesh, and so it is her body that must be mortified by the avenging “angels” aboard the ship. And while it would seem that the word wins out (one could argue that Bess’ adulterous immorality is punished by her death), the recovery of Jan’s body at the end of the film suggests otherwise, as do the bells. But of those more will be said later. Perhaps the reason many viewers find the movie so difficult to watch and such a cause of consternation is that it attempts, like a philosophical 3

Stephen Heath suggests something similar in his discussion of feminine jouissance and the God face. See his article “God, Faith and Film: Breaking the Waves,” 1998: 107.

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treatise, to teach us how to behave as ethical subjects. This is a hard lesson, one that we do not necessarily want to learn because it means giving up the familiar comfort of our symptoms, ambivalences, misrecognitions—in short, our ego defenses. According to the model of ethics proposed by Lacan, in order to assume the status of an ethical subject, we must come to be where foreign forces once dominated. We must subjectify the otherness. “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden,” said Freud, which Lacan has translated as “where the Other pulls the strings (acting as my cause), I must come into being as my own cause” (Fink 1995: xiii). It is probably safe to say that most of us have suffered at the hands of an/Other, but instead of remaining the object of external events, instead of continuing to articulate our pain from the position of object, instead of making statements such as “Something bad happened to me” or “They did this to me,” we must place ourselves in the subject position. We must say, “I was,” “I hurt,” or “I cried.” For even if we are alienated in and by a language that is not our own—in other words, even if we are castrated—there is the possibility of coming to terms with that alienation through language. By making it our own. Rather than continuing to blame the Other for whatever ails us, we can make ourselves both cause and cure. This, I would argue, is precisely what von Trier and Bess do. They remain steadfast subjects in the face of great opposition from the big Others who pull the strings. Love, Death, and At

Although von Trier says his original title was Love is Omnipresent, he might very well have called his film Another Antigone, especially given the fact that it was from Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc and Gertrude that he received inspiration. At first glance, comparing von Trier’s film to Sophocles’ drama may seem like comparing apples and oranges, but if we do the work of deciphering von Trier’s slip of the tongue, what emerges in the character of Bess is the same sort of ethical stance taken by Antigone. The back story to Antigone is as follows: the two sons of Oedipus have become rivals for the ruler-ship of Thebes. Eteocles, refusing to give up the throne, exiles his brother, Polyneices, who recruits a military force in Argos and leads an attack against Thebes. In the ensuing battle, the Thebans defeat the Argives, and the brothers kill each other, leaving their uncle, Creon, to rule the city. As the play opens, we learn from Antigone the fate of the two brothers: “Creon has given / An honored burial to one, to the other / Only unburied shame” (Wilkie and Hurt 1988: II: 21-23). In other words, not only has Antigone been refused the right to mourn but also Polyneices has been

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refused proper burial rites—this because, in the eyes of the state, he has become an outsider and, worse still, an outlaw. When Antigone announces to her sister that she intends to bury her brother despite Creon’s edict, which declares that anyone caught attempting to bury the traitorous dead shall be put to death, Ismene expresses grave misgivings: O think Antigone! We who are women / Should not contend with men; we who are weak / Are ruled by the stronger, so that we must obey / In this and in matters that are yet more bitter. / And so I pray the dead to pardon me / If I obey our rulers, since I must. / To be too bold in what we do is madness. (1988: II: 61-67)

Like Ismene, Bess’ mother warns Bess of the penalty breaking church law entails: “Have you any idea what it’s like to be cast out? You will have nothing, Bess. I’ve known strong men and women to wither away after being cast out, and you are not strong. You’re a feeble girl. T’would kill you, Bess!” Clearly, Antigone and Bess know well in advance the terrible fate that will follow their mad acts, and yet both women choose to act anyway. It is the radical madness of their acts that link their stories, for both women die in order to honor the men they love. To understand these stories as narratives depicting a patriarchal scene in which the “little woman” stands by her man would be a mistake, however. In both cases, to stand by one’s man is precisely a defiance of the patriarchal fathers, and given the tremendous power wielded by the patriarchy in both ancient Greek society and the isolated Presbyterian community of which Bess is a member, it is surely madness to act against its interests—a special kind of madness that Derrida associates with an “infinite ‘idea of justice’ […] irreducible in its affirmative character, in its demand of gift without exchange, without circulation, without recognition or gratitude, without economic circularity, without calculation and without rules, without reason and without rationality” (1992: 25). In this idea of justice, continues Derrida, we can recognize, “indeed accuse, identify a madness” (1992: 25). What fascinates us about Bess and commands our respect and admiration is that in defying the law, she, like Antigone, “lays bare the violence of the legal system, the juridical order itself” (1992: 33). While we are certainly chilled to the bone by the depraved brutality Bess meets with aboard the big ship, what is more disturbing still is the violence of the church, which is manifested in the stoning of Bess by the children who chase her and call her a tart, by the church elder’s refusal to give Bess aid when she lies hurt and exhausted by the church door, and by the burial rite in which she is consigned to hell. It is Bess’ idea of justice— one that operates without what the community would call reason or rationality—that finally exposes the injustice of the church. And, thus, the

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repressive church becomes the mirror image and/or the double of the vicious sailors. They are, one might say, cut of the same cloth. Although Antigone begins with death and Breaking the Waves with a wedding celebration, the joy we see in the first two “chapters” of the film soon gives way to grief when Jan is forced to return to the oil rig where he is employed. Bess reacts to his departure as if it is a death rather than a temporary separation. She seems to understand existence in the same way a child does who can make things “gone” by closing its eyes. For unless Jan’s bodily presence is before her, it really is as if he has died. Bess’ only comforts in the days that follow his departure are a small transistor radio and a calendar on which she marks off the days until his return—two objects that function as relics and/or the remaining fragments of a beloved but dead body. We know these objects are not simply reminders but remainders when the calendar turns up missing and Bess accuses Dodo of having stolen it. Because of the extremity of her agitation over the missing calendar, she might as well be accusing Dodo of having robbed Jan’s grave and stolen his bones. And it is through her agitation that we come to understand how Bess comprehends certain abstractions such as the passage of time, for her reaction to the loss of the calendar suggests that unless she finds the particular calendar on which the days have been marked off, she will have to begin again from day one. That is to say, the marks Bess makes on the calendar have, for her, the magical effect of canceling out the days that intervene between the present and future, and if the calendar is lost, then so too are the cancelled-out days. In short, one calendar cannot substitute for another. Appropriately enough, the cross-like marks Bess makes on the calendar are different from the X’s one might expect to see, and they are placed beside the numbers, not through them. The calendar resembles nothing, then, if not a graveyard. Each day of Jan’s absence is a “dead” day, registered by Bess’ own grave marker. When Dodo finally retrieves the missing calendar, we watch as Bess puts the ripped pieces together again, an act that will later be repeated when she attempts to put Jan back together again. We also learn in this scene that after Bess’ brother died, Bess had been institutionalized. The implication is that her reaction to Jan’s absence is the same as her reaction to her brother’s death. In both cases, she has been forbidden to mourn because any sort of emotion, affect, or excess is frowned upon by the community. Thus, we see emerge one of the central parallels between Antigone and Bess: both have been forbidden to mourn the loss of a brother, and so, figuratively speaking, both brothers remain unburied and continue to haunt the living. Once the connection is established between Bess’ behavior at the loss of her brother and the departure of Jan, we realize that Jan has come to stand in for Bess’

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unmourned and thus “unburied” brother, especially after Jan’s body has been paralyzed—that is, once he comes to occupy the marginal space between two deaths. Like Polyneices, who is biologically dead but symbolically alive, Jan is biologically alive but symbolically dead, still breathing but hardly able to participate in the institutions that make up the symbolic universe we occupy. And it is into this marginal space between two deaths, what the ancient Greeks call at, that Antigone and Bess must go in order to honor the dead. Part of what is at stake for Antigone is the integrity of her brother’s body. As long as it lies unburied outside the city gates, it is, in the words of the blind prophet Tiresias, a mangled corpse “[h]allowed with funeral rites by dogs or beasts / Or birds who bear the all-polluting stench / To every city having hearth or altar” (1988: II: 1012-1014). Or, as Antigone remarks, “his wretched body / Shall lie unmourned, unwept, unsepulchered. / Sweet will he seem to the vultures when they find him, / A welcome feast that they are eager for” (1988: II: 27-30). The same is at stake for Bess. In all of the scenes showing Bess and Jan interacting, the focus is on their bodies, not their conversation. This is also true of the scenes showing Jan’s interaction with his male friends. For example, just prior to the scene in which Jan’s accident occurs, he and his friends on the oil rig have been in the shower room, listening to music and frolicking about in the nude, playing the silly but obviously pleasurable games men play in that situation and generally reveling in their bodies. As they pass a joint around, the transistor radio they are listening to continually falls off the narrow shelf on which it has been placed, leading one of the men to hurl it into a shower stall. In the scene that follows, an explosion causes a heavy piece of equipment to strike Jan’s head. Although he is taken by helicopter to a hospital and operated on immediately, the surgeons are not successful in their efforts to repair his body, and we soon learn that not only is he completely paralyzed but also, as his condition deteriorates, incapable of speech. Thus we shift rapidly from a scene that foregrounds the body to a scene that grounds the body, grounds it in the sense of holding it hostage. When the radio breaks, the music stops. And why does the radio break? Because the music is simply too big. After Jan’s accident, the body takes on even greater importance, its centrality to this particular set of human relations becoming painfully clear on two occasions: first, when Jan asks Bess not to wear the dress he bought for her but to wear something loose that doesn’t show off her figure. As he explains to her, it is too painful to be able to see her body but not be able to make love. Second, when Jan’s friends come to visit him in the hospital. They file into the room, oozing merriment, but when they set an unopened can of beer on Jan’s bedside tray and he makes no move to take it, they realize that their friend has lost the use of his limbs. Immediately, they come

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to his rescue, opening the beer and holding it to his lips, but, to everyone’s dismay, the frothy liquid spills down his chin and disappears inside the stiff plastic collar supporting his neck. This visit comes to a hasty conclusion when Jan says, “I’m not really supposed to have visitors.” The relief at being let off the hook is palpable; his friends leave the room as if fleeing for their lives. And so the stage is set for what will be seen as Jan’s “sick” or perverted request. “I’m finished, Bess,” he tells her abruptly. Again, the implication is that the body is of primary importance. If he cannot make love to his wife or raise a beer can to his lips, he is as good as dead. Out of concern for Bess’ happiness, then, he makes the following suggestion: “You could take a lover without anybody noticing, but you can’t divorce me. They’d never let you.” The “they” he refers to here is the group of church elders who make all of the important decisions for the members of the community and who, in fact, must be petitioned for permission to marry. “Can you tell us what matrimony is?” they ask Bess. And, then, because Jan is an outsider, they ask a follow-up question: “What have the outsiders brought us of value?” Bess replies without hesitation, “Their music.” To the elders, this may sound like an innocent enough response, but what they fail to understand is the relationship between making music and making love—both of which are means of ecstatic transport for Bess and both of which she is willing to die for. Because Jan’s music is, to put it crudely, in his balls (“He is a great lover,” she tells Dr. Richardson), Bess makes waves in order to keep the waves (that is, sound waves and orgastic waves) breaking.4 Despite the fact that Jan cannot make love and the church elders will never grant her a divorce, Bess violently rejects Jan’s suggestion. So Jan changes his tactics but not his ultimate goal, which is to find a sexual outlet for his young wife. The next time Bess comes to visit, he begins making the case in this way: “Love is a powerful thing, isn’t it?” Bess seems to recognize this as a rhetorical question that will be used to make an argument for something she does not want, but she cannot disagree with the initial premise, and so she nods mutely. Undeterred by her silence, Jan forges on: “If I die, it will be because love cannot keep me alive. But I can hardly remember what it’s like to make love, and if I forget that, then I’ll die.” After pausing to allow Bess to digest what he has said, he continues. “Remember our telephone conversation? We made love without being together. I want you to find a man to make love to and then come back here and tell me about it.” “I can’t,” says Bess quite simply. But when she says, “I can’t,” we are not to 4

Stephen Heath argues that von Trier’s title “finds one prime meaning here, picking up conventional descriptions of female orgasm as waves breaking” (1998: 97).

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interpret this as “I won’t,” for that would suggest obstinacy. The point is this: although Jan was able to “make love without being together” because he understands fantasy and the metaphorical nature of language, Bess does not. In fact, during the scene to which Jan refers, Bess maintains throughout the conversation a wide-eyed, child-like expression, which suggests a sort of disbelief or amazement at the disembodied voice she hears through the telephone receiver. “I can hear you breathing,” she says. “Can you hear me?” For Bess, the question lurking behind this rather simple one is much more complex: how can Jan be absent and present at the same time? And so when Jan argues that in making love to another man Bess will be making love to her husband, it sounds to her like a contradiction in terms. “I love you,” she says. “I don’t love some other man.” It is not until Jan convinces her that he wants her to do this for his sake and not for hers that she is willing to consider the proposal. “This morning,” says Jan, “when I told you to get a lover, it wasn’t for your sake. It was for my sake. ‘Cause I don’t want to die. I’m afraid’.” We know this is a specious argument because in an earlier scene Jan had attempted to commit suicide. He is not afraid of his own death; what he fears is that Bess will become, as he has, one of the living dead if her sexuality (her music) is allowed to wither and die. While Bess’ first attempt to do Jan’s bidding is unsuccessful, the scene depicting this attempt prepares us for the scene in which Bess tries rather awkwardly to narrate a sexual fantasy for Jan. Since Dr. Richardson is at hand, connected to Jan’s body via the surgery he has performed, it is not surprising that Bess would choose him as the object of her first “adulterous” foray. In this scene, Bess is dancing to an Elton John song while Dr. Richardson sits and watches. A moment passes in which the music blares, and then Dr. Richardson says, “Bess, stop dancing and talk to me.” Because she appears to ignore him, he says again but this time more urgently, “Bess, talk to me.” The emphasis is on the word “talk.” Finally, she registers his request, replying, “Give me five minutes,” and disappears into an adjoining room. When Dr. Richardson appears in the doorway, he finds Bess lying on the bed completely naked. She smiles pleasantly at him and whispers, “You can touch me now. You can have me now.” Dancing to music, one body touching another, one body “having” another: this is Bess’ version of talking. The fact that she and Dr. Richardson do not actually make love presents a difficulty when Bess tries to narrate a sex scene, for she cannot use words that have no connection to a real bodily experience. “I’m lying on my back, all naked,” she tells Jan. Then she pauses as if struggling to think of what might come next in the narrative. Each statement is followed by a similar pause, an occasional “uhm” of delay, and the most simple of coordinating conjunctions: “And he comes in and he sees me… and he kisses my

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breasts… and he enters me… and he’s making love to me—gently… he’s coming.” And thus, as the film progresses, we see that Bess understands Jan’s request in terms rather different from those in which he has made it. When Jan says he does not want to die, he is speaking metaphorically, but Bess interprets his words literally. Bess participates in sexual acts with the same conviction that those who believe in transubstantiation eat the communion wafer. It is not a symbolic gesture, nor is it one that operates in the field of the imaginary. When she has sex with other men, she is not imagining Jan in their place as one might in sexual fantasy. Nor is she able to substitute word for act via (sexual) narrative. For Bess, each sexual encounter is the same as taping one piece of the torn calendar to another. In other words, for Bess, no substitutions are possible. Given the repressive nature of the community to which she belongs, it comes as no surprise that Bess is soon banned from the church and her mother’s home because of what the elders perceive to be immoral sex acts on her part. After she has made her first visit to the big ship and been frightened by the brutality of the sailors, she hurries to the church, where she hopes to find comfort. Instead, she finds one of the male elders preaching a doctrine she cannot accept: “there is only one way for us, sinners that we are, to achieve perfection in the eyes of God: through unconditional love for the word that is written, through unconditional love for the law.” “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” says Bess. “You cannot love words. You cannot be in love with a word. You can love another human being. That’s perfection.” As soon as the church fathers recover from their surprise at hearing Bess speak, they turn her out of the church, saying, “No woman speaks here.” This scene makes it clear to Bess that the church is not her ally, and so she inserts her body where the church inserts the word. Although von Trier labels the final chapter of the film “Bess’ Sacrifice,” her return to the big ship must be seen as what Slavoj i ek calls a “feminine act” rather than a sacrifice, for the sacrifice remains directed at the Other, its question the anxiety-producing “Che vuoi?” or “What does the Other want of me?” According to i ek, “every act worthy of this name is ‘mad’ in the sense of radical unaccountability: by means of it, I put at stake everything, including myself, my symbolic identity” (1992: 44). As Bess is ferried out to the big ship for the second time, she is no longer operating within the economy of the church, no longer trying to be good, no longer making bargains with God. Instead, she is responding to what Malmo calls the Justice that comes from Dike: “As the female deity who orders the life of the world, Dike is the way of all nature, the pulse and rhythm of the universe. The law of Dike is the law of destiny, coming before even the law of the gods” (1997:

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154). Like Antigone, who loves her brother because of his radical singularity, Bess loves Jan because Jan is Jan. What Bess loves is the thing that is in Jan more than Jan, the object small a, which has no content but around which identity circulates. This is why Bess loves Jan whether he is fully or partially paralyzed, mute, “sick,” or perverse. This is why Bess replies, “I love you no matter what is in your head,” when Jan writes in unsteady letters, “Let me die. I’m evil in head.” As Malmo says of Antigone, It is this incarnate uniqueness that Antigone addresses when she calls Polynices, “Kasigneton kara”—“beloved head, beloved face of my brother.” In its cherished physicality, its one-and-only-ness of bone, skin, and expression, the body, but most of all the face, confronts us with the truth of how the ethical demand, the inescapable summons of Dike, comes not from some law of universality or logos, but from the call of a unique other and from the law of desire. (1997: 155)

Surely we can hear Bess echoing Antigone’s “Kasigneton kara” as she makes the journey into at, from which she returns the mangled corpse that Sophocles’ blind prophet describes as hallowed with funeral rites by dogs or beasts, both of which are appropriate terms for the men aboard the ship who kill her and the men of the church who consign her to hell as they lower a coffin full of sand into the ground. Bells, Balls, and Miracles bell, v.t.; belled, pt., pp.; belling, ppr. to attach a bell or bells to; to furnish or equip with a bell or bells. to bell the cat; to undertake a hazardous task: from the fable of the mice resolving to put a bell on the cat, to guard them against his attack. bell, v.i.; [ME. belle, from AS. bellan, to roar.] to call or make a peculiar sound, as that of the deer in the rutting season. The wild buck bells from ferny brake. (Sir Walter Scott) Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary

After Jan has buried Bess at sea, which is certainly a more appropriate resting place for her body than the church yard, he is roused from sleep by an excited friend who pulls him onto the deck of the ship and points skyward. There, they and we see a giant pair of bells ringing Bess’ soul into heaven—at least, that is how some viewers understand this final image. If we return to the

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beginning of the film, however, another way of understanding the bells emerges. When Bess and Jan are exiting the church after their marriage ceremony, one of Jan’s friends looks at the minister expectantly and says, “Ring the bells, then!” “Our church has no bells,” replies the minister as the camera focuses on the empty bell tower. This needs emphasis: there is a bell tower with no bells, as if at one time the bells had been there but had been removed for some mysterious reason. Shortly after this exchange between Jan’s friend and the minister, the subject of bells comes up a second time, and Bess says to Jan in all the rapture of new love, “Let’s put the bells back again.” And for a second time the camera focuses on the empty bell tower. Consequently, when a pair of bells appears in the sky at the very end of the movie, we realize that the discussion of bells (the word) and the actual appearance of bells (the thing) are the framing moments of the film and that this is what the movie has been about all along: putting the bells back, “belling” the body. If the empty bell tower represents castration, the two swinging bells suspended in the heavens bellowing out their joyful noise like a deer in rutting season are the lost balls. And what do bells do, after all? They call the faithful to come. Bibliography Björkman, Stig (1996). “Naked Miracles,” Sight and Sound, trans. Alexander Keiller, Oct. 1996, 11-14. Derrida, Jacques (1992). “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, eds. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, New York: Routledge, 3-67. Fink, Bruce (1995). The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, Princeton: Princeton UP. Freud, Sigmund (1979). “Neurosis and Psychosis,” On Psychopathology, trans. James Strachey, New York: Penguin, 209-218. Giannetti, Louis (2002). Understanding Movies, 9th ed, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Heath, Stephen (1998). “God, Faith and Film: Breaking the Waves,” Literature and Theology, 12: 1, 93-107. Lacan, Jacques (1977). Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: W. W. Norton. Malmo, Jane (1997). “The Jouissance of Justice,” Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious, 1, 153-158.

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—— (1994). “Towards a Limitless Love: From Symptom to Sinthôme in Milton’s Samson Agonistes,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture / Theory / Politics, 23, 81-95. Nelson, Victoria (1997). “The New Expressionism: Why the Bells Ring in Breaking the Waves,” Salmagundi, 116-117, 228-237. Sophocles (1988). Antigone, trans. Theodore Howard Banks, Literature of the Western World, ed. Brian Wilkie and James Hurt, 2nd ed., 2 vols, New York: Macmillan.

i ek, Slavoj (1992). Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan In Hollywood and Out, New York: Routledge