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Reviewed by:
  • The Ethics of Love: An Essay on James Joyce by Benjamin Boysen
  • Gian Balsamo
Benjamin Boysen, The Ethics of Love: An Essay on James Joyce Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2013, 656 pp.

If philosophical diatribes were duels, Thomas Nagel would be a minimalist master fencer. And his words of praise for Sartre’s concept of the “look” would be celebrated mainly because of the restrained fencing foil’s touch he scores on the body of French existentialism. It is the experience of shame, writes Sartre, that reveals to us the existence of the other. Someone catches me in an embarrassing position or situation, and of a sudden I sense that there is an other, and this other, whose look burdens me with shame, is a subject, for whom I am an object. This is in a nutshell the Sartrean foundation of subjectivity through the “look”: “a real insight,” writes Nagel, “about the preintellectual place of other minds in the structure of individual consciousness” (168). After this statement, Nagel goes on to soberly remark that Sartre’s notion of shame is “a bit sophisticated,” and we ought perhaps to pay more attention to forms of the “look” that we could even experience as infants, such as “the look that makes me feel loved or threatened” (168). It takes both argumentative nerve and a deep faith in the perspicacity of one’s readers to switch the foundation of subjectivity from shame to love as if it were an afterthought. But such is Nagel’s unique, ironic touch.

In his monumental The Ethics of Love: An Essay on James Joyce, the Danish scholar Benjamin Boysen does not take off from analytic philosophy but rather from the continentalist tribe that includes Sartre and his rival Heidegger, together [End Page 329] with many of their precursors and successors, from Husserl to Derrida and Marion and Girard, from Freud to Lacan and Kristeva. Boysen makes nonetheless the same foundational move as Nagel’s: our being sprouts out of our lover’s gaze, he claims, because our lover’s gaze “contains an infinite and abysmal heterogeneity [yet it] simultaneously contains an inscrutable and inexhaustible source that gives us being perpetually” (11) Contrary to Sartre’s gaze of shame, the lover’s gaze which Boysen talks about satisfies Nagel’s requirement that it should be experienceable even by an infant in the arms of the mother. However, it is Sartrean to a significant extent, this gaze, in that it opens up the place in our consciousness where we meet, in the other, our primary source and guarantor of existence and personal identity. Love is not something which I have by right. Love can only be given—to me and at once, by me. As a matter of fact, I must give love as a mutual precondition of my own and my lover’s existential instantiation. I owe love to my lover, in payment of a never-fully-settled debt, and love is owed to me by her, in payment of a never-fully-paid-off hypothec. À propos, Boysen mentions Mauss and his frequently-cited logic of the gift: “By giving, one gives of oneself, and if one gives of oneself, it’s because one owes oneself [to the other]” (17, my translation); more precisely, one owes oneself to one’s lover, as Boysen would likely argue.

Love’s gravity, which pulls us toward the beloved, is the lever of moral action in Love’s Ethics. In 625 densely printed pages, Boysen turns the pure and practical reasons that are the implicit subject of his title into a signifier of the advent, presence, and action of love itself in the guise of altruism, reciprocity, and moral choice. Issues conventionally debated by ethicists are hardly ever tackled in Love’s Ethics, aside from the obligatory, politically correct reference to Martha Nussbaum’s view that “love […] can provide powerful guidance toward social justice” (13). Boysen prefers to save the long wave of his outstanding argumentative momentum for the application, to absolutely all of Joyce’s works, of the precept that the lover’s gaze is the vehicle for the transmission of existence and identity from love itself...

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