Already Responsible

Already Responsible

In this essay I want to explicate the intuition that literature demands an ethical response that not only precedes interpretation but also serves as its basis. I am not arguing that the response to texts should be ethical, but simply that it is ethical before it is interpretive. The interpretive position adopted by critics of literature is determined not by the "interpretive community" to which they belong, nor by their “a priori” biases and ideological perspective, but by the responsibility they assume toward the text. The community to which a critic belongs and the biases and perspective that give shape to her interpretation are themselves determined by the critic's responsibilities. How we respond to others establishes our commitment to them. The response to a literary text is a pledge and critics bind themselves to a view of it by what they take themselves to be responsible for.

Perhaps the best account of responsibility is that of Emmanuel Levinas. Although the philosophical discussion of responsibility is at least as old as Aristotle's Politics, since the 1940’s the term belongs by rights to Levinas. A naturalized French Jew born in Kovno, Lithuania, 92 percent of whose 30,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis including most of his family, Levinas survived the war as a French officer in a POW camp near Hanover, studying Hegel, Proust, Diderot, and Rousseau (Cohen 115-21).

As shown his own work, "From the Rise of Nihilism" it is likely that he experienced the "belated shame” often experienced by Jews after the Holocaust occurred (220). It shows that he experienced the kind of survivor guilt that gnaws at the conscience of the individual and is expressed clearly in authors like Primo Levi. In fact, Levinas's entire philosophy grows out of the tentative anxiety that one person's life usurps another's. All those who lived through the years 1939 to 1945 "retained a burn on their sides," he remarks, "as though they had to bear for ever the shame of having survived" (221).

Levinas argues in his "Ethics as First Philosophy" that human subjectivity or self-consciousness is “mauvaise conscience,” the feeling of being "not guilty, but accused" (72). Stripped of its intentionality and existing in a condition of passivity, the human subject is put into question. What am I? To be, I have to respond. "But, from that point," Levinas explains, "in affirming this me being, one has to respond to one's right to be" (my emphasis 74). Self-consciousness is then self-justification, because it is consciousness of being without the intention of being. By this thinking, I am aware of my existence, but I did nothing to bring about my existence. I am prey to the gnawings of conscience but does that mean that it is possible that I came into being as the result of a crime of which I am unaware? Levinas puts it even more strongly later in “Ethics as First Philosophy:”

My being-in-the-world or my "place in the sun," my being at home, have these not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the other man whom I have already oppressed or starved, or driven out into a third world; are they not acts of repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing? Pascal's "my place in the sun" marks the beginning of the image of the usurpation of the whole earth. (81-82)

Since the first stirrings of consciousness are the anxiety, the first question before the human subject is the ethical question, how are you to respond to this uneasy sense of being "not guilty, but accused"? All human action, every effort to budge from the passivity of subjectivity, is a response to ethical challenge. Hence ethics are "first philosophy," logically prior to any other mode of thought (71).

The advice of deontology, that it is better to suffer injustice than to cause it, is hardly comforting to those who are rasped by the “mauvaise conscience” that they have already caused injustice. "Self-consciousness is not an inoffensive action in which the self takes note of its being," Levinas says; "it is inseparable from a consciousness of justice and injustice” (“Ethics…” 75). What he proposes in “Transcendence and Height" is to replace deontology with a counterfactual ethics of responsibility. This is to say that, if I am not guilty of hurting another I cannot be blamed for it; but if I nevertheless feel accused of it I can take responsibility for it. In this way perhaps I can both ease my conscience and begin to repair any damage that I might have caused. My responsibility to the person I might have hurt, the human Other, preempts any claims of my own. Because the injury is counterfactual, because it is not specified and unlimited,