The Encounter with the Other

269 Pages·2016·2.36 MB·English

by  Jillene Bydder

http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/

Research Commons at the University of Waikato

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thesis.
The Ethics of Reading:
Levinas and Gadamer on encountering the other in literature

A thesis
submitted in fulfilment
of the requirements for the degree
of
Doctor of Philosophy
at
The University of Waikato
by
MELANIE JANE DOUGAN

2016
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Abstract

This dissertation explores the question ‘can we encounter the Other through the
mediation of literature?’ The question reflects an increasing interest in ethics by
literary theorists and particularly in the application of Emmanuel Levinas’s work
to the field of literary studies. I identify a major concern with this trend that has
been largely overlooked: Levinas states that the Other cannot be encountered
through the mediation of literature. With questions of justice towards texts and the
necessity to respect alterity at the forefront, I argue that Levinas’s concerns cannot
be overlooked. To explore a possible solution to the problem I first consider
Levinas’s concerns with literature and argue that his adamant stance on the Other
and literature stems not so much from the arguments he puts forward but a human
conviction that the ethical is limited to the immediate face-to-face encounter. I
suggest that this desire which cannot be fully accounted for by his philosophical
account finds its origin in the Holocaust but, more than this, can be seen as the
ethical saying interrupting and disturbing his writing.
The answer to the question of the thesis hinges on the interpretation of
both who the Other is and what exactly the encounter with the Other means for
Levinas. Unlike most literary theorists, I do not look for ways in which Levinas’s
ethical work is portrayed in literary texts; I am interested in the text as Other and
the reader’s responsibility towards it rather than situations or characters that fit the
face-to-face model. I draw upon Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics to both
consider the relation one has with regard to a text and to clarify who exactly the
Other might be. I conclude by trying to rehabilitate the idea of author but couch
this in Gadamerian terms, it is the world view or horizon of the text that we
encounter as other and I name this ‘author’. My consideration of Gadamer
confirms that we feel that we encounter alterity in literature and he suggests a way
to say something about this that does not annihilate otherness. I then return to the
problem of literature for Levinas and find that I can answer the question of the
thesis affirmatively, with some qualification. I argue that the Levinasian encounter
is best understood by analogy to the Kantian sublime. We cannot encounter the
Other at all except through experiences that signify or remind us of this primordial
encounter. Lived encounters with the other are structurally similar to and signify
the encounter with the Other which in turn gives the everyday encounters their
meaning. I combine this interpretation with Jean Baudrillard’s argument regarding
representation in photography which posits a view of a productive presentation of
the fiction of reality rather than a hollow representation of an absent reality. With
a positive answer to the question of the thesis in hand, I read Edgar Allan Poe’s
short story, ‘The Purloined Letter’ to explore the implications of my research in a
concrete example.

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To Richard
Who makes me smile and feel loved every day

iv
Preface and Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following people for their contribution to my thesis:
My supervisor, Dr Mark Houlahan, for his unerring optimism, good humour and
encouragement. His insightful comments, nudges in the right direction and
engaging conversation have kept me focused and mindful of the project as a
whole.
I would like to thank my secondary supervisor, Dr Kirstine Moffat, for her
support, thoughtful comments and encouragement. Her enthusiasm for the final
literary reading chapter helped me keep my eye on the prize.
Thanks must also be given to Dr Matheson Russell for his initial help shaping the
idea behind this thesis.
I would like to thank Dr Tracy Bowell for her helpful conversations about Levinas,
particularly about how to deal with the bits that seemed not to make sense.
Dr Sterling Lynch for his suggestion to look at Baudrillard’s essay on
photography.
And, finally, I could not have written this thesis without the support of my
husband, Richard Viskovic. Thank you for your patience, help with formatting
and many technical emergencies, for your willingness to listen to my half-formed
ideas and arguments, but mostly thank you for being you.

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Table of Contents
Abstract ................................................................................................................... iii
Preface and Acknowledgments ............................................................................... v
Introduction: setting the scene ................................................................................. 1
Ethical leanings ................................................................................................................ 2
Why Levinas? Why now? ................................................................................................ 5
The Problem .................................................................................................................... 9
Chapter Summaries ....................................................................................................... 13
Chapter One: The Encounter with the Other ......................................................... 15
Introduction .................................................................................................................. 15
Ethics as First Philosophy .............................................................................................. 16
The Encounter with the Other; an initial view .............................................................. 19
Language; the saying and the said ................................................................................ 30
Encountering the Other: A summary and application to literature .............................. 45
Chapter Two: The problem of literature ................................................................ 50
Introduction .................................................................................................................. 50
Levinas and literature thus far ...................................................................................... 51
Reading: some problems and thoughts ........................................................................ 59
Reading like an ethical philosopher .............................................................................. 62
The problem with literature .......................................................................................... 68
Eaglestone’s response ................................................................................................... 88
My response: why literature is still problematic ........................................................... 94
Summary ..................................................................................................................... 102
Chapter Three: Gadamer’s Hermeneutics ........................................................... 104
Introduction ................................................................................................................ 104
Why Gadamer?............................................................................................................ 108
Gadamer – an introduction ......................................................................................... 110
Mimesis, representation and the spectator................................................................ 112
From child’s play to art................................................................................................ 113
The ontological status of works of literary art ............................................................ 116
Understanding – the miracle of transformation and the role of hermeneutics ......... 121
Hermeneutics .............................................................................................................. 123
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Unprejudicing prejudice .............................................................................................. 126
The fusion of horizons ................................................................................................. 128
Understanding through dialogue ................................................................................ 131
Understanding texts .................................................................................................... 132
Summary ..................................................................................................................... 133
Chapter Four: Face-to-face: Levinas and Gadamer ............................................ 135
Introduction ................................................................................................................ 135
Similarities ................................................................................................................... 135
Differences .................................................................................................................. 143
The work of literature as a Thou ................................................................................. 153
Who is this Other? ...................................................................................................... 157
Tradition as Other ....................................................................................................... 159
The ethical demand .................................................................................................... 167
Summary ..................................................................................................................... 169
Chapter Five: an answer? .................................................................................... 171
Introduction ................................................................................................................ 171
The encounter: empirical or transcendental? ............................................................ 173
The Infinite and ethics ................................................................................................ 180
The sublime as analogy for the encounter with the Other ......................................... 185
Conditions for an empirical encounter with the other ............................................... 189
Lessons from photography ......................................................................................... 192
The place of need ........................................................................................................ 198
Back to the question of literature ............................................................................... 201
Summary ..................................................................................................................... 207
Chapter Six: ‘The Purloined Letter’ .................................................................... 210
Introduction ................................................................................................................ 210
Background ................................................................................................................. 211
The necessity of failure ............................................................................................... 212
Failure as a space for otherness? ................................................................................ 218
Back to Poe ................................................................................................................. 222
Reading Poe, an honest phenomenological account .................................................. 227
Potential sites of otherness ........................................................................................ 230
Toward understanding ................................................................................................ 235
The crisis of self ........................................................................................................... 241
vii
Summary ..................................................................................................................... 244
Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 246
Bibliography ........................................................................................................ 256

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Introduction: setting the scene

Those interested in literature in the twenty-first century have a difficult task ahead
of them: ‘the text’ has been expanded to include everything from shopping lists to
fashion shows; the borders between literature and other discourses have dissolved;
and meaning has supposedly been indefinitely deferred. In the wake of
postmodernism a number of literary critics and philosophers of literature seem to
be turning to ethics and questions of the Other in an effort to reconstruct an
understanding of the nature and function of literature. In particular, the work of
Emmanuel Levinas is being applied more and more to the study of literature to
describe what happens when a reader engages with a literary text.
An initial justification for the shift in attention to an ethics of reading is
suggested by the fact that ethical notions are often invoked in naïve descriptions
of the act of reading. People talk about doing justice to the text; we accuse others
of committing violence in their reading; and praise film directors for faithful
interpretations of novels. With so much of what seemed to make literature special
undermined by postmodern thought it seems a natural and potentially fruitful line
of thought to look to how we interact with literary texts and try to carve out a
place for them in terms of this encounter.
It is these concerns that lead me to the aim of this thesis, which is to
investigate the question: ‘how can we have an encounter with the Other through
the mediation of literature?’ Two main thinkers will be drawn upon to answer this
question. Levinas’s account of the encounter with the Other will provide the basis
for the phenomenological account of the nature of the encounter with the Other.
Hans-Georg Gadamer will be discussed to give a hermeneutic account of how this
encounter can produce meaning or an interpretation. It is also a guiding
hypothesis of this research project that reflection upon the ethics of reading may
reveal something about the nature of literary texts that direct ontological
interrogation is unable to account for.

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