Of Levinas and Shakespeare: "To See Another Thus"

Introduction

Moshe Gold and Sandor Goodhart

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

—Shakespeare (MND 5.1.14-17).¹

but whate’er I be,

Nor I nor any man that but man is

With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased

With being nothing

—Shakespeare (R2 5.5.38-41)

Shakespearean tragedy is above all the contact of man and nothingness, of nothingness in its ambiguity [son équivoque], in its diabolical form.… Shakespeare is the fabricator of nothingness; he who gives to nothingness the appearances of being

—Levinas (CC 174)²

[I]t sometimes seems to me, Emmanuel Levinas writes, in one of the first books he publishes after the war, that the whole of philosophy is only a meditation of Shakespeare (TO 72).³ The whole of philosophy. For Levinas, that phrase includes, among other writers, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger; but also, of course, the ancients—Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. Levinas’s wording here is key. The entirety of philosophy for him is a meditation of Shakespeare (une méditation de Shakespeare), which is to say, not about Shakespeare but of Shakespeare, from Shakespeare, a part of Shakespeare’s subject matter, his work—his plays, his poems. As if, for all of our critical acumen, we remain already lodged entirely within Shakespeare’s writing, as figments of his dramas, of his thinking about us.

What astounding humility! As if everything that I (Levinas) am attempting to do, my entire phenomenological project—the reconstitution of European subjectivity on an ethical foundation—were already within Shakespeare’s own philosophic reach. Have other philosophers thought the same? Is not Shakespeare customarily relegated within philosophic writing—metaphysical and phenomenological alike—to the category of aesthetics, and from aesthetics, to dramatic literature and dramatic representation? Do other philosophers really think their own thoughts were already Shakespeare’s four hundred years ago?

What about literary critics—scholars or theoreticians of Shakespeare, for example? Do they see Shakespeare as groundbreaking in the same way they see themselves (especially in the romantic era)? Or rather, in praise of Shakespeare’s iconoclasm and infinite variety, have they not ironically constructed an elaborate matrix of inclusions and exclusions effectively sacrificing the critical commentary his writing offers us?⁴ The formal tradition of Shakespeare criticism, from Pope, Johnson, and Dryden, through Wordsworth and Coleridge, through Arnold, Bradley, Eliot, Leavis, Lewis, and countless others, seems largely to have ignored the possibility that Shakespeare’s writing is self-reflexive.⁵ Not challenging it, necessarily, but putting it aside in pursuit of other more legitimate ends. Formal and historical considerations have often superseded discussion of Shakespeare as a critical thinker. Even considerations gathered from psychoanalytic and, on occasion, religious studies are deemed permissible ahead of regarding Shakespeare as a bonafide commentator on his own writing so long as such considerations are couched in the appropriate cultural studies garb. Moral approaches as well remain acceptable only so long as they echo the approaches of Kantian and Hegelian philosophers who read in accord with the categorical imperative or the end of history and the birth of modern secularism.

The European humanist perspective, in short, the primacy of the subject of consciousness before objects of knowledge, would seem the order of the day in both literary and philosophic study. In that context, the idea that Shakespeare could be writing about us—about the dramas in which we continue to live and work—would seem, for the mainstream of critical thinking about Shakespeare (whether within philosophy or literary study), not a little outrageous.

What if, in following Levinas’s post-war model, we take a critical leap? Levinas distinguishes between the act of saying something and its reproduction some moments later as something said, between le dire (the to say or saying) and le dit (the said).⁶ What if we read Levinas’s claim as a challenge addressed to philosophers and literary critics alike? Is the literary criticism of Shakespeare that we consider ethical to be regarded henceforth exclusively as a meditation on what Shakespeare has already said, or can it be a meditation on what he continues so powerfully to say to us in our current circumstances? Books on Levinas and more general philosophical topics deriving from his work abound. Scholars have been able to identify at least seventy-nine English language book titles (or subtitles) with the words Levinas and or and Levinas followed (or preceded) by the name of another writer or academic field. It is at least surprising, given Shakespeare’s significant and positive influence on Levinas’s corpus, that no single volume has yet appeared on the import of his explicitly identified English literary predecessor upon the Jewish philosophic thinker, or of these two writers upon each other.⁷ Although a handful of scholars have juxtaposed these authors in isolated essays, there exists as yet no monograph or collection devoted to pursuing the implications for philosophy, religious studies, and literary criticism of the intricate and manifold relationships between these two towering iconic figures of our Western intellectual tradition.⁸

One function of the current volume is to address that gap. But the omission is odd in other ways. Wider nets have been cast. One recent volume combines Shakespeare with discussion of Levinas and some fifteen other philosophic thinkers—celebrated authors in Shakespeare studies and in continental philosophy one notable publisher’s blurb proclaims, a book that successfully brings the two fields into dialogue with each other.⁹

One brief essay on Levinas and Shakespeare, however, does not a book-length volume make.¹⁰ Upon the heels of the quadricen-tennial anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, perhaps the ghost of one of Europe’s most revered literary writers can startle us from our familiar competencies, our literary and critical complacencies, and confront us with the obligations and responsibilities of a new ethical criticism. Perhaps it is time for us, with Levinas, to say of Shakespeare what Hamlet says of the ghost Shakespeare may himself have once played on the Elizabethan stage, O my prophetic soul! and Meet it is I set it down (H 1.5.41, H 1.5.108).

In seeking to foster an ongoing dialogue between Shakespeare and Levinas, the contributors to the current collection remain acutely aware of the risks involved in their enterprise: the temptation to repeat familiar readings of one or another writer rather than engage their thought directly, the danger of reducing nuanced complexities to a few aphorisms or paraphrases, the pitfalls of failing to know enough scholarship within multiple fields of inquiry.

And then there are the risks associated with the genre of criticism itself. Rather than attempt to apply some kind of Levinasian literary critical methodology to Shakespeare, or concomitantly endeavor to affirm that Shakespeare has already engaged all that Levinas would later discover in his philosophic or religious studies writing, the writers in the current collection place Levinas and Shakespeare side by side in asymptotic relationships with each other. For all their different emphases, these essays collectively suggest that the proximity of one author to the other exposes respectively the discourses of philosophy, literary studies, and religious studies (by which we have traditionally understood them) to their deepest ethical dimensions in ways that are both inspiring and precarious, ways that if pursued more deeply or more distantly could turn out to have tragic and comic potentials of their own. Indeed, the care shown in this volume to both Shakespeare’s works and those of Levinas demonstrates the potential for vibrant new scholarship to rethink in its entirety the generic relation of tragedy to comedy.

The collection includes three previously published essays and nine essays written specifically for this volume by a range of scholars, each of which sheds new light on the intriguing interrelation of Shakespeare to Levinas and Levinas to Shakespeare. Some of these essays discuss Levinas’s ideas in order to rethink early modern genre theory. Others read Levinas to open up previously unexplored aspects of individual plays. Still others contend that bringing to bear upon Shakespearean and Levinasian scholarship the largely unacknowledged discourse of religious studies intensifies and enriches any venture into ethical criticism. All promise to deepen our understanding of Shakespeare while demonstrating at the same time how fruitful Levinas’s ideas can be in the study of literature.

Levinas can, for example, give us a better sense of what is at stake in Shakespearean drama and can supply us with a rich vocabulary and sophisticated theoretical framework for describing its operation and effects. Concomitantly, Shakespeare’s art can do much to clarify the radical quality of Levinas’s philosophic thought. Unlike more domesticated versions of ethical criticism, Levinas’s writing does more than merely urge us in the direction of tolerance or acceptance: it challenges and rebuilds the very framework of subjectivity from which such ethical claims proceed. Similarly, Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, focusing as such writing often does upon the necessity and difficulty of responding to the demands of another person in comic, tragic, historical, and romantic contexts, gains clarity from Levinas’s untangling of our infinite responsibility for the other individual, for the other person or neighbor standing there alongside of me, as opposed to the abstract idea of the other we commonly invoke. The arresting singularity of Shakespeare’s humanized characters, the vivid particularity of his humanly imagined worlds, constitutes technical innovations whose aesthetic virtuosity is energized by its ethical urgency.

Nor do the essayists in this collection shy away from the glaring and familiar problem of introducing Levinas in context of the discussion of any work of literature. On the one hand, it is a commonplace of Levinas studies that Levinas distrusted art as an escape or evasion. Inasmuch as art provides us with selfish pleasures and enables our escape from the real world, it offers us a kind of false transcendence. In this respect, art remains but an idol: a lifeless object put in place of the living Other. On the other hand, Levinas readily admitted his philosophical debts to specific authors and referred often to their literary works in his own writings (Shakespeare being for him among the most prominent). The best authors, for Levinas, not only recognize and resist art’s idolatrous potential but also wrestle with the core philosophical and religious questions that it raises. If we take seriously a question Levinas asks—is not reading a way of inhabiting? The volume of the book as a form of living space!—then inhabiting the living spaces of Shakespeare and Levinas can contribute to contemporary debates concerning art’s ability (or inability) to show us the way out of Being, engaging us in the difficulties of freeing ourselves from the ontological constraints in which we all of necessity reside (BV 128). Reading and performing great art together in the company of profound ethical criticism and philosophic writing—might not such an inhabiting form a kind of ethical discourse that continually interrupts itself and calls itself into question? Shakespeare’s art, it would seem, does as much in spades. His works continue to surprise, bewilder, and evade us, compelling us to make a response, and then examine that response in advance.

What about scriptural writing, which is often the mainstay of Levinas’s religious studies subject matter? The bringing together of the ethical and the literary also brings the literary into dialogue with religious concerns and so in scholarship with religious studies. Not surprisingly, Levinas insists that the task of the commentator on scripture and writing about scripture is not to solve, settle, or decipher the text but to renew it. The life of the Talmudist, Levinas writes, is nothing but the permanent renewal of the letter through the intelligence (NT 79). Taking this comment beyond the Talmud to apply to literary writing at large and Shakespeare’s writing in particular, this volume claims that no amount of erudition, historical contextualization, or critical knowledge of Shakespeare can substitute for the unceasing work of asking questions of the text (and listening to the questions the text poses to us). Anything but its incessant questioning threatens to turn the text into a dead letter, an academic artifact containing obscurities of no interest to students, scholars, or any other popular or high brow readers.

In the present collection, then, we turn to these two great writers in an attempt to bring some measure of renewal to Shakespeare’s and Levinas’s works through our approach to them. It is our hope that the essays contained herein perform the kind of responsible questioning that ought to provoke a new and viable ethical criticism, a critical writing that engages at the deepest level what it means to be a subject for whom ethical considerations are a part of the very air one breathes. As a volume with interests in philosophy, religious studies, and literary criticism, among other fields, it should be of interest to scholars and graduate students working in various areas of modern philosophy and contemporary religious thought, as well as those engaged in Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies, and, more generally, in literary criticism and theory. The collection endeavors to offer seasoned experts across the disciplines it engages fresh and compelling arguments while offering beginning graduate students and advanced undergraduates accessible orientation to scholarly study of Levinas, Shakespeare, and the issues their implied dialogue opens up.

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In A Meditation, which was originally titled Some Reflections on Levinas on Shakespeare, Richard A. Cohen opens the door to the discussion we would follow in this collection. Examining carefully what appears to be every known reference in Levinas to Shakespeare in the published works of the philosopher, Cohen makes the case in full for the centrality of Shakespeare to Levinas’s critical project. As such, his essay remains a tribute to the richness of both writers, and we have duly chosen to reproduce his contribution as the rightful progenitor of this field of joint inquiry, a tribute echoed in numerous essays within this collection.

Within the essay, Cohen begins by unpacking Levinas’s declaration (cited above) that the whole of philosophy is but a meditation of Shakespeare. Noting the philosopher’s striking use of the possessive of in relating philosophy to Shakespeare, the author argues that this phrasing suggests "not that all of philosophy is a meditation about Shakespeare … but rather that the whole of philosophy is a meditation by Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s meditation," Shakespeare meditating on philosophy.¹¹ Cohen explores the degree to which Shakespeare’s world reverberates with various forms of moral exigency, religious rigor, the call to justice, and the demands of other great literature. Attending to the elevating exigencies of an ethical metaphysics [that] find their full expression in a Shakespeare as they can find their proper articulation in all the world’s great literatures, Cohen surmises that Shakespeare dramatizes what Levinas would recognize as human worlds with human characters driven to the heights of justice and morality. The Bard in this reading is not a moralist with flavorful maxims to distribute, but rather, his writings give testimony to the Infinite (EI 116). As such, Cohen’s clear survey of Levinas on Shakespeare has indeed offered many readers a way into the rigors of ethical exegesis.

But since the publication of Cohen’s essay in 2001, Levinas’s prison notebooks have been found and published. These are writings he composed while imprisoned during the Second World War. These notebooks reveal a striking correlation with both the philosopher’s earlier ideas (written in the thirties) and his later ideas as expressed in Existence and Existents, Time and the Other, and other texts. This correlation is especially evident in his comments about Shakespeare and in particular the tragedies. Here for example is a sample of his comments about Shakespeare as the fabricator of nothingness:

Shakespearean tragedy is above all the contact of man and nothingness, of nothingness in its ambiguity [son équivoque], in its diabolical form. Lie (King Lear, Othello), the ambiguity [équivoque] of the witches (Macbeth), the ghost (Hamlet). And from it derives the essential role in most Shakespearean tragedies of the liar and the traitor. Shakespeare is the fabricator of nothingness; he who gives to nothingness the appearances of being.

The character Hamlet is particularly profound [in this regard], for there man has pierced ambiguity or rather he has made of this ambiguity the very theme of suffering. Hamlet is the reflection upon Shakespearean tragedy itself. He suffers from the insinuation of nothingness within being or of being within nothingness. To be or not to be—everything is there.

I take up again the theme of death: the fact that death equals the loss of the capacity to play shows that death is not as strong as being. Even if it concludes being, it does not exhaust all that being has done. Therefore, even within the hypothesis of Macbeth, it is neither an end nor within.…

Macbeth too, like Hamlet, is frightened by the fact that death perhaps does not exist—that it resolves nothing. His fright in seeing Banquo is in this sense the culminating point of the tragedy. It is starting from this moment moreover that he is without fear in the crime and that these scruples against which Lady Macbeth had fought no longer exist for him. Why? Despair (CC 174, 195-196).¹²

As Richard Cohen argued before the prison notebooks were published, and as Howard Caygill remarked more recently upon the publication of the Carnets material, these writings are invaluable for acknowledging and responding to the importance of Shakespeare for Levinas’s philosophizing.¹³

Cohen’s essay is followed here by three essays on one of the tragedies, King Lear. In Lear’s ‘Darker Purpose’, Sandor Goodhart takes a distinctly counter-redemptive view. He suggests that the play stages what might be characterized, echoing the king’s own language, as Lear’s darker purpose. No rescue? What, a prisoner? (4.6.191) Lear exclaims at one point, when he awakens on the heath, a sick, frail, and dying old man in the long central storm scenes, as if the whole maneuver of dividing up the kingdom has been explicitly undertaken in the expectation of a fairy-tale ending, the kind of happy conclusion or promised end that indeed the story on which the play is based encouraged. In Shakespeare’s assessment of the world, Goodhart argues, Lear dies holding his dead daughter Cordelia in his arms, a lurid testimony only to his inability to distinguish a live human being from a deceased one (I know when one is dead, and when one lives, he says (5.3.261)), projective fantasies from real human relations. Levinas clarifies in Goodhart’s view the perspective that Lear fails to read (lire, in French), and which constitutes one of the sources of his delirium: namely, infinite responsibility for the other individual, the other human being, the neighbor.

Ann Astell offers a second essay on Lear. After highlighting their mutual interest in Shakespearean drama, Bible, and law, Astell imagines Levinas and theorist René Girard as "Readers of King Lear. She speculates that Levinas would foreground the bonds of filial and parental piety that establish vertical relationships between characters, whereas Girard would focus on the horizontal" relationships of sibling rivalry. These complementary critical axiologies meet, in Astell’s analysis, at the play’s center, in the violence of the storm on the heath, where Girard’s scapegoated outcast encounters Levinas’s needy orphan. This encounter, in turn, serves to transform the disguised Edgar into an apocalyptic figure whose self-revelation at the play’s conclusion renews the revelation of commandment itself.

In a third essay on Lear, "Theology, Phenomenology, and the Divine in King Lear," Kent R. Lehnhof observes that Cordelia figures into Shakespeare’s King Lear much as l’autrui figures into Levinas’s philosophy. The one who overawes, obsesses, and afflicts Lear, Cordelia is also in his view the one who summons and solicits him from beyond being. She disincarnates the divine in the play in a non-systematic and non-thematizable way. This is not to say, in his view, that Lear is finally and simply a Levinasian fable of some kind. Rather, it is to suggest that Shakespeare was as invested in interpersonal relationships as was Levinas and appears to have entertained some similar ideas about them, including the idea that transcendence is not an effect of ecstasy or apotheosis but of interrelation.

In "Investment, Return, Alterity, and The Merchant of Venice," Geoffrey Baker uses the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, in particular the overlooked leitmotif of circulation, in order to re-assess the location of social critique in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Levinas’s understanding of circulation and giving can be understood, respectively, as forms of return and non-return. Read in this way, The Merchant of Venice produces and negotiates several key binaries, familiar to even more traditional readings of the play, as effects of circulation or giving, including Judaism and Christianity, justice and mercy, outbound and homeward journeys, investments returned and investments lost, taking and giving. A Levinas-based reading of these structures and their prominent role in Shakespeare’s play demonstrates to what great extent they are all interwoven and invested in each other, and in what manner rampant venture capital, simultaneously the pride and fall of Venice, is implicated at every step. Focused as Baker is upon the structures of meaning that enable and limit ethical relations in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare in his view emerges as a social critic more interested in interrogating the epistemological foundations than the mere social forces of economic relations.

In their jointly authored paper, Traces, Faces, and Ghosts, Hilaire Kallendorf and Claire Katz approach the relationship between Levinas and Shakespeare by examining an under theorized theme—the role of the ghost in the works of both authors. In his 1946/7 lecture course, Time and the Other, Levinas forges both explicit and implicit connections among several of his central themes—the trace, the face, alterity, the ethical—connecting these themes to the ghost through his reference to a visitation. This essay examines the relationship between the face and the trace, using the ghostly apparition, especially in Macbeth, as a way to connect these tropes in Levinas’s work.

In From Horror to Solitude to Maternity, Steven Shankman reflects upon the way Shakespeare figures in Levinas’s philosophical development from the time of the appearance of Existence and Existents and Time and Other, both published just after the Second World War, through Humanism of the Other and Otherwise than Being in the early 1970s; and secondly, he considers how Levinas’s thought can, in turn, open up the ethical dimension of Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear, three plays that Levinas particularly admired. His essay thus places Shakespeare’s three greatest tragedies (Macbeth, Hamlet, and Lear) in the context of Levinas’s developing ideas as a philosopher, and it suggests how, if we read these plays with Levinas’s thought in mind, we can see in them as yet unrevealed ethical depths.

In "The Frustration of Desire and the Weakness of Power in Venus and Adonis, Sean Lawrence brings Levinas’s critique of representation and his description of the erotic relationship to bear on Venus and Adonis," one of Shakespeare’s little-studied narrative poems. The recalcitrance of the Other to power explains not only why Venus fails to win the love of Adonis, but also why she must fail, inevitably. Where recent critics have tended to understand most relations as relations of power, a Levinasian reading allows us to see how Shakespeare dramatizes the failure of power in the frustration of Venus’s desire.

In Ethical Ambiguity of the Maternal in Shakespeare’s First Romances, Donald Wehrs argues that within Shakespeare’s England, the propensity of social affection to emerge from and resolve itself back into self-centered concerns was identified with original sin, but his romances challenge philosophical and theological accounts of self-love’s primacy. Pericles and Cymbeline delineate how the opening of the body to affect opens patriarchal cultural orders to the corrective authority of feminine voices (both actual women and maternal nature) and the soul to the regenerative effects of forgiveness. What Shakespeare dramatizes resembles and may be illuminated by Levinas’s analogous tracing of how felt experience of the ethical enables the self to recover, in a romance-like way, vital, redemptive parts of itself that, like daughters and wives in Shakespearean romance, tend to be occluded, lost, or forfeited, but may, wondrously, be reclaimed and affirmed.

In "Culinary Skepticism in As You Like It and Montaigne’s ‘Of Experience’," David B. Goldstein argues that both Michel de Montaigne and Shakespeare anticipate Emmanuel Levinas’s argument that eating forms a material basis for skeptical inquiry. Shakespeare’s As You Like It uses eating as a tool to explore and articulate skeptical approaches to knowledge. Its approach mirrors that of Montaigne’s own brand of culinary skepticism, expressed most clearly in the last of his Essais, Of Experience, which documents human materiality (especially through practices of eating and defecating, since these actions expose us at our most material), in order to resist the ideology of abstract perfection that Montaigne and Shakespeare both find so societally destructive. In one context, we find a skeptical and anti-ethical phenomenon, in which eating is a form of devourment, an exercise of power, a skeptical tearing apart of boundaries. In another context, eating functions commensally and performatively, helping to form ethically stable communities.

Finally, in "Staging Humanity in As You Like It and Pirkei Avot," Moshe Gold stages a reading and thinking together of Levinas and Shakespeare’s comedy by way of the transmission of commentaries in Rabbinic thought on a specific Mishnah in Pirkei Avot, one that catalogues distinct educational life stages. Rethinking the dramatic, and pedagogical, encounters between Jaques and Rosalind, on the one hand, and the Seven Ages speech and a Rabbinic staging of ages on the other, Gold argues that to better understand the ramifications of a Levinasian Other as a teacher, we might constructively consult what Levinas himself wrote in a note from 1946: My philosophy—is a philosophy of the face-to-face. Relation to the other, without intermediary. It is that of Judaism.¹⁴ Blowing on the coals of Rabbinic traditions that transmit commentaries on one’s ethical/educational development, Gold helps Shakespeareans and Levinasians better understand how Shakespeare stages and performs ethical behavior via particular responses to Jaques’s pessimistic and static Seven Ages speech. In so doing, he argues for a revision of critical methodology to move beyond thematic religious explorations of a Shakespearean text to include Jewish thought as challenging standard receptions of the play, Shakespeare studies, and Levinasian philosophy. In this manner, Gold commemorates a Jewish sermon given on the Tercentenary of the death of Shakespeare in which the speaker, talking about Shakespeare and Rabbinic Thought, refers to the great playwright as, among other designations, a teacher of ethics.¹⁵

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The essays that follow are far from the only essays that could have been written to engage Levinas with Shakespeare and Shakespeare with Levinas. But our hope remains that they will offer a first step, a gateway to a future encounter between two powerful writers and critical thinkers that will endure and prove beneficial for all concerned, an opening into which other authors will engage other plays or poems or philosophic tracts and thereby pursue other avenues along which critical thinking and the ethical will find themselves irretrievably entangled.

Notes

¹ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1 See Stephen Greenblatt, ed. The Norton Shakespeare (2008).

² La tragédie shakespearienne est avant tout le contact de l’homme et du néant, du néant dans son équivoque, dans sa forme diabolique.… Il [Shakespeare] est le fabricant du néant. Celui qui donne au néant les apparences de l’être. See Emmanuel Levinas, Œuvres Complètes Tome I: Carnets de captivité et autres inédits (Paris: Grasset, 2009), 174; hereafter cited as CC.

³ Mais il me semble parfois que toute la philosophie n’est qu’une méditation de Shakespeare (TO 72 / TA 60). Richard A. Cohen takes this sentence as the foundation for his ground-breaking essay. See below. One thinks of Hamlet’s remark: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / than are dreamt of in your philosophy (1.5.167-168).

⁴ Sandor Goodhart has written extensively about this question. See for example Sacrificing Commentary: Reading the End of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), especially 245-288.

⁵ Which is to say, reflective at minimum of both itself and its subsequent reception in historical criticism.

⁶ See, for example, OB 5-7.

⁷ In his interview with Philipe Nemo, Levinas professes his indebtedness to "the great writers of Western Europe, notably Shakespeare, much admired in Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear" (EI 22). Levinas also, of course, opens Otherwise than Being with a reference to Shakespeare, alluding to both Hamlet and Macbeth on the first page.

⁸ The gap is notable. Books treating Levinas and a variety of other writers, works, fields, and historical periods are plentiful. Levinas and Henry James, Levinas and Ancient Philosophy, Levinas and Theology, Levinas and the 18th Century, and Levinas and the 19th Century are among the most well known. Levinas would seem to have been identified as a writer whose work opens doors to a plethora of scholarly concerns. And yet, strangely enough, nothing of the kind exists vis-à-vis Levinas and Shakespeare.

⁹ See Jennifer Ann Bates and Richard Wilson, Shakespeare and Continental Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2014). Aside from Levinas, chapters include discussions of Shakespeare and Aristotle, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Marion, Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Arendt, Agamben, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, and Derrida among others.

¹⁰ See Howard Caygill, Levinas and Shakespeare, in Bates and Wilson 2014, 145-151.

¹¹ Cohen’s work, we must acknowledge, is one inspirational source for the current volume you are now reading.

¹² La tragédie shakespearienne est avant tout le contact de l’homme et du néant, du néant dans son équivoque, dans sa forme diabolique. Le mensonge (Le roi Lear, Othello), l’équivoque des sorcières (Macbeth) ; le fantôme (Hamlet). D’ou le rôle essentiel dans la pluparts des tragédies shakespearienne du menteur et du traître. Il est le fabricant du néant. Celui qui donne au néant les apparences de l’être. / Hamlet est particulièrement profond, car là l’homme a percé l’équivoque ou plutôt il a fait de cette équivoque le thème même de la souffrance. Hamlet c’est la réflexion sur la tragédie shakespearienne. Il souffre de l’insinuation du néant dans l’être ou de l’être dans le néant. Être ou ne pas être—tout est là.… Je reprends le thème de la mort : Le fait que la mort = jeu perdu prouve que la mort n’est pas aussi forte que l’être. Même si elle finit l’être elle n’épuise pas tout ce qu’il a fait. Donc même dans l’hypothèse de Macbeth (1) elle n’est pas une fin ni dans (3) (CC 174) … Macbeth—lui aussi comme Hamlet est effrayé du fait que la mort n’existe peut-être pas—qu’elle ne résout rien. Son effroi en voyant Banquo est dans ce sens le point culminant de la tragédie. C’est à partir de ce moment d’ailleurs qu’il est sans crainte dans le crime et que ses scrupules contre lesquelles lady Macbeth avait à lutter n’existent plus. Pourquoi? Désespoir. (CC 195-196)

¹³ See Howard Caygill, Levinas’s Prison Notebooks, Radical Philosophy, 160 (March/April 2010), pp. 27-35.

¹⁴ The note appears in Levinas’s Carnets de captivité (186), and is quoted in both Caygill’s Levinas’s Prison Notebooks (35) and in Caygill’s Levinas and Shakespeare (149).

¹⁵ See Gollancz, The Rev. Professor Harmann. Shakespeare and Rabbinic Thought: Sermon Delivered at the Bayswater Synagogue, London, On Sabbath, April 29th, 1916. London: Wertheimer, Lea & Co., Clifton House, Worship Street. E. C., 1916.

1: A Meditation

Richard A. Cohen

A Meditation of Shakespeare

To link Emmanuel Levinas, twentieth century Jewish French philosopher of ethics, and William Shakespeare, sixteenth century Elizabethan dramatist and poet, is neither an idle fancy nor an arbitrary academic exercise. Even beyond a natural curiosity that wants to understand the links that bring together all spirits who are of the first rank, regardless of whatever differences in epoch, culture, station, language, and genre may separate them, there is in this case a special reason for making this conjunction. It is the unforgettable claim made by Levinas at the start of his own career in 1947, in Time and the Other: [I]t sometimes seems to me, he declared, that the whole of philosophy is but a meditation of Shakespeare (TO 72).¹ Then, too, there is the no less memorable but more general claim by Shakespeare, or rather, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, (after being told by his father’s spirit that his father did not die a natural death but was murdered) to his friend Horatio: There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. While Hamlet’s claim is congruent with Levinas’s, since both deny the usual self-proclaimed comprehensiveness and finality of philosophy, the claims are nevertheless asymmetrical. Hamlet’s claim declares that philosophy is limited, a view oft expressed, especially in Western religious thought, while Levinas’s claim, in contrast, determines the limit of philosophy as one that Shakespeare surpasses. Let us add that we have no doubts that for Levinas, Shakespeare is but one instance, and not the exclusive instance, of the surpassing of philosophy.

What is striking about Levinas’s assertion is the combination of its universal quantification of philosophy, its grand reference to the whole of philosophy, and its use of the possessive of to link philosophy to Shakespeare. What this means is not that all of philosophy is a meditation about Shakespeare, which by itself would already be a remarkable and thoughtworthy possibility, but rather that the whole of philosophy is a meditation by Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s meditation. What Levinas is suggesting, then, is that Shakespeare—whatever is meant by Shakespeare, and this is what we will have to investigate—subsumes philosophy, and not, as one might ordinarily suppose, that philosophy, which has always held itself out to be an account of the whole, and ideally as the whole account of the whole—subsumes Shakespeare. If by Shakespeare, he means, minimally, great literature, and I think this is so, then what follows is that instead of philosophy being the truth of the art of literature, the art of literature would be the […] the what?—this is our question—of philosophy. In any event, we must ask what is the meaning of this reversal of the personal and the impersonal? Not philosophy meditating on Shakespeare, but Shakespeare meditating on philosophy.

What can it mean for philosophy to be conceived as a Shakespearean meditation? Shakespeare lived and died before the birth of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Bergson, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger. Does Levinas’s statement mean, then, that philosophy ended before these thinkers? Levinas, who in the 1930s and 1940s introduced Husserl and Heidegger to twentieth century French thought, can hardly mean this. Does it not mean, more broadly and more decisively, that discursive or conceptual thought, contrary to the self-proclamations of philosophy, is subsumed by a more concrete dimension or element beyond discursive or conceptual thought, a dimension or element manifest in the world of Shakespearean drama and poetry? I think here lies the key to Levinas’s statement. Philosophy lives in thought, in concepts, in knowledge, in making the unequal equal, in the life of the mind, while Shakespeare presents a world, an artistic rendition of the life-world in its unfinished, temporal, and dialogical character. It is a matter of closeness to the unique. A literary world, in contrast to a philosophical concept, does not simply refer but replicates—highlights—such characterizations as the one way directionality of time and history, or, more importantly, the exigencies of morality and justice. Truth lies in neither mute particularity nor abstract universality but in singularity, where particular and universal meet. In a word, Shakespeare’s dramatic world is more concrete than philosophy’s discursive universe. Merleau-Ponty correctly taught that philosophy does not surpass the world when it abstracts its truth, rather it reduces and eviscerates the flesh of the world, the ambiguities of an always unfinished and always already ongoing discovery and construction of meaning.²

Let us remember, too, that in its French context Levinas’s use of the term meditation in a personal possessive construction has a specific resonance. To anyone versed in French culture, it directly calls to mind the famous Meditations on First Philosophy of René Descartes. And as a matter of historical fact, Shakespeare and Descartes were contemporaries. Descartes was twenty years old when Shakespeare died in 1616. Had he wanted, he could have attended the openings of The Tempest or Henry VIII in England. And yet, beyond an accident of chronology and geography, to link Shakespeare and Descartes is to juxtapose nearly opposite sensibilities: the rich humanist morality, the divine comedy of the dramatist and poet; the clear and distinct analytical epistemology, the geometrical method of the philosopher of science. In the estimation of French thought, and in numerous histories of European philosophy, Descartes is considered the greatest of French philosophers, the first modern philosopher, and sometimes even the greatest of all philosophers tout court. Whatever the appraisal of his reputation and status, Descartes is acknowledged to be the first modern philosopher, the first philosopher, that is to say, committed fundamentally to the calculus of a thoroughly mathematical science. In its intention, Descartes’s meditation and method are first philosophy in the most profound modern sense. Descartes’s philosophy would be a self-contained cogitation, truth thought from the ground up without any dependence external to intellect, autonomy, and absolute freedom in the strictest most rational sense (even if in certain respects Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel would more consistently carry out elements of Descartes’s own intention). This digression from Shakespeare to Descartes is intended to indicate that Levinas’s use of the phrase meditation of Shakespeare carries enormous philosophical weight, even more than might be imagined at first glance. Thus Levinas’s claim that the whole of philosophy is but a meditation of Shakespeare gives incalculable philosophical prestige to Shakespeare and literature, and perhaps more broadly still to poesis.

Would philosophy then be a subset of art? Would truth, then, be a special case of lie, as Plato warns in the Republic and Nietzsche celebrates? Is Levinas’s praise for Shakespeare the sign of his adherence to a long Western tradition of aesthetics, whether Bergsonian, Nietzschean, Heideggerian, or Deleuzean, to name only recent avatars of this tradition? No one can in good faith think that this is so. All of Levinas’s thought stands against it. Which is to say all of Levinas’s thought is a prolonged and profound defense of ethics as first philosophy. Indeed, Time and the Other, wherein Levinas articulates his extravagant claim regarding Shakespeare and philosophy, is already a work of ethical metaphysics. It is already a work that grounds labor, mortality, meaning, and time in social relations, and hence in morality, and ultimately in justice. Throughout his long philosophical career, Levinas, with great subtlety and penetration, criticizes the irresponsibility of philosophies and worldviews devoted to the manifestation of being, in all its semantic and semiotic sophistication. Nevertheless, in the pursuit of this ethical task he will freely invoke literary works such as Dostoyevsky’s