Of Levinas and Shakespeare by Gold Moshe; Goodhart Sandor; Lehnhof Kent & Sandor Goodhart & Kent Lehnhof

Author:Gold, Moshe; Goodhart, Sandor; Lehnhof, Kent & Sandor Goodhart & Kent Lehnhof
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Purdue University Press

Notes

1 See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994) and Ken McMullen, Ghost Dance (1983).

2 Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” in Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark C. Taylor, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 359, emphasis ours. Levinas repeatedly uses the term “visitation” when talking about the face in Humanism of the Other.

3 Jeremy Tambling argues that Macbeth shares his wife’s imperviousness to the Other, declaring starkly in reference to time that “its otherness cannot impinge on him” (Jeremy Tambling, “Levinas and Macbeth’s ‘Strange Images of Death’,” Essays in Criticism 54 [2004]: 351-372, 357). We would differ with him here, instead seeing a hierarchy of moral sensibility in which Lady Macbeth figures lower on the ethical scale.

4 Jeremy Tambling interprets this vision as a precursor of Macbeth’s own disembodied head which will be paraded across the stage at the end of the play: “the first apparition was an armed head, a head so framed it cannot show signs of horror, its identity remaining ambiguous till it turns out to be Macbeth’s” (Tambling, “Levinas and Macbeth’s ‘Strange Images of Death,’” 364). This could well be, but the interpretation is rather fanciful and seems not directly supported by the text. At the very least, we believe other interpretations are also possible.

5 Juliet’s power to die would thus form a contrast to Jeremy Tambling’s claim that Macbeth does not have the power to die: “Macbeth is deprived of the power to die. The individual has overcome the other in order to assert his existence, but that commits him to the assertion of unceasing mastery” (Tambling, “Levinas and Macbeth’s ‘Strange Images of Death,’” 365).

6 See also the discussion in Totality and Infinity—specifically in “The Love of Life” subsection of “I and Dependence.” Here Levinas says, “Suicide is tragic, for death does not bring resolution to all problems to which birth gave rise, and is powerless to humiliate the values of the earth—whence Macbeth’s final cry in confronting death, defeated because the universe is not destroyed at the same time as his life. Suffering at the same time despairs for the being riveted to being—and loves the beginning to which it is riveted. It knows the impossibility of quitting life” (TI 146). See also TI 231.

7 Andrew Cutrofello, All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).

8 Cutrofello, All for Nothing, 83.

9 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962), 307.

10 Levinas, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003).

11 See Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

12 Jeffrey Berman, Empathic Teaching: Education for Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004).

13 Ibid., Empathic Teaching, 101.

14 http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/06/08/euroupdate-2-is-science-art/, consulted 13 January 2015.

15 Oxford English Dictionary online, consulted 13 January 2015.

16 Megan Craig, Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 60-61.

17 The latter of these was published not only several years after Totality and Infinity but also after the appearance of “Signification and Sense” (1963).

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