The turn to religion in Early Modern English studies

Criticism, Wntr, 2004 by Ken Jackson, Arthur F. Marotti

Greenblatt's rather specific critical interest in alterity and the subsequent calls from New Historical scholarship to respect alterity, in fact, derive largely from the "ethical" direction provided by Emmanuel Levinas's response to Husserl's phenomenology. For Husserl, the "other" self confounded his efforts to establish the individual consciousness as the creator of meaning. In short, if an individual consciousness determines meaning in the world, how does one account for "others" also determining meaning? I cannot make sense of the "other" ego trying to make sense of me without transforming that other into part of my same/or self.

For Husserl, this was an epistemological problem: how can one understand or know the other knowing ego? (48) In his Theorie de l'intuition dans la phenomenologie de Husserl (1930), however, Levinas gave this "epistemological" problem of otherness an ethical inflection that persists in much critical thought, including Greenblatt's New Historicism. (49) The other ego that cannot be known became not only a gap in my understanding, an unanswerable problem that complicates my ability to ground all understanding in individual consciousness as phenomenology sought to do, but the other as other ego (autrui) that exerts an ethical call on me that must be addressed. (50)

For Levinas, responsibility for the other--the ethical--precedes questions of knowing or even questions of Being. Ethics precedes epistemology or ontology. The self is itself determined by the very encounter with alterity. The ethical encounter with the other brings the subject into being. In one sense, this ethical move by Levinas solves the previously irresolvable problem of self/other relations. Because the ethical encounter with alterity precedes even subjectivity, the problem of the self-obliterating alterity of the other dissolves because the "other" is there in the "self" from the start. The aporia of self/other relations, in short, disappears.

But Levinas's suggestion that the "other" is there from the very beginning--in some sense originary or foundational--ultimately tends only to reconstitute the "other" as another name for being, another logos, rather than solve Husserl's phenomenological problem. Quite simply, knowing or responding to the "other" is impossible and must remain an aporia that we approach and respect rather than solve. Jacques Derrida explained years ago "that alterity had to circulate at the origin of meanings" and, therefore, "the Greek thought of Being forever has protected itself against every absolutely surprising convocation." (51)

According to Derrida, Levinas underestimates not only the elusiveness of alterity but the degree of respect for alterity already present in earlier thinkers. Soren Kierkegaard, for example, whom Levinas critiques for privileging the same, "had a sense of the relationship to the irreducibility of the totally other, not in the egoistic and esthetic here and now, but in the religious beyond of the concept, in the direction of a certain Abraham." (52) In other words, Kierkegaard's reading of Abraham and the alterity of the absolutely other puts him closer to Levinas's thought than Levinas would allow. Levinas habitually differentiates himself from Kierkegaard, Hem de Vries points out, by insisting on the "trans-descendence" of alterity. (53) The "other" for Levinas always involves the other individual in a "face-to-face" encounter. This does not negate the infinitely other, the absolutely other, the religious other--"God, for example"--but for Levinas that absolutely other always leaves its trace in the "other" as other individual)4 Derrida's sustained critique of Levinas, however, reveals that this distinction between the "other" and the "absolutely other" (God), the distinction between Levinas and Kierkegaard, cannot hold. (55)