Versions of Ethics; Or, The SARL of Criticism: Sonority, Arrogation, Letting-Be

One who cites an utterance in the name of its original speaker brings redemption to the world.

The Sages, tractate Pirke Avot ("Ethics of the Fathers")

A book is interrupted discourse catching up with its own breaks. But books have their fate; they belong to a world they do not include, but recognize by being printed, and by being prefaced and getting themselves preceded with forewords. They are interrupted, and call for other books and in the end are interpreted in a saying distinct from the said.

Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being; Or, Beyond Essence

It is never enough . . . to say that interpretation is misinterpretation or that borrowings inevitably involve misreadings. . . . [M]isreadings [are] part of a historical transfer of ideas and theories from one setting to another.

Edward Said, "Travelling Theory"

To speak here only of borrowing and adaptation is not adequate. There is in particular an intellectual, and perhaps moral, community of a remarkable kind, affiliation in the deepest and most interesting sense of the word.

Edward Said, "Travelling Theory Reconsidered"

1. Proem I: Revelations

From the unison-sound of ethics in the titles under review, a once-common descant is currently enjoying new life against the background of contemporary voicings. Yet, opines Lawrence Buell in a recent PMLA issue devoted to ethics and literary study, "nobody seems to have worried much about a problem of cacophony" (11). Buell's well-chosen phrase rings the right changes except that they resound otherwise than perhaps intended. For while he has in mind the contestatory, frustratingly diffuse nature of ethics as a term, variously leveraged--an "increasingly ductile and thereby potentially confusing signifier . . . gallingly (excitingly?) ambidextrous" (14)--I am concerned with the very sonority of that critical discourse itself as knowingly, accidentally, or negatively articulated. Writing about ethics, in other words, may miss the opportunity to enact it in discursive praxis.

Take, for example, the privileged place that many of the books under review assign to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. In the 1970s and 1980s Jacques Derrida and M. M. Bakhtin provided literary theory with approaches to the heteronomy of text and voice that could be harmonized with a homegrown history of pluralism and diversity; their own home contexts notwithstanding, they helped to renarrate an older, American story of pluribus and unum. A more recent turn to ethics that seeks to add moral weight to this preoccupation with otherness finds itself turning likewise to the continental figure of Levinas. Like Bakhtin, Levinas's personal witness to totalitarian depredation gives his intellectual project peculiar force, material and moral; his standing in postmodern thought, facilitated by Derrida himself, exercises an additional gravitational pull. So Geoffrey Harpham got it exactly right when his book written in 1989, Getting It Right: Language, Literature, and Ethics (1992), began its argument about "the power of ethics" by addressing Levinas--whom Harpham designates, significantly, as "the Lithuanian philosopher" (7).

Yet it is precisely a marker of such cultural specificity as this, so keyed to transnational as well as distinctively American preoccupations with otherness that remains unaccountably muffled in the current, burgeoning chorus of critical interventions invoking Levinas as tutelary genius. Left similarly à la sourdine are Levinas's signature lectures on Talmudic passages and his essays in criticism, the sort of hermeneutic exercise one might think peculiarly suited to a heuristic ethical criticism.

Why should Levinas's origins in Jewish Eastern Europe let alone his writings on Judaism matter? Shouldn't the less encumbered, departicularized extension of his intellectual stature within philosophy take precedence, indeed suffice for literary studies? In The Wisdom of Love (1997), Alain Finkielkraut confronts such questions head on, arguing that it is the very seam in Levinas's work between two arguably competing universes of discourse, philosophy, and Judaism, that makes him such an indispensable figure for debates about universal and particular forms of cultural identity. In Finkielkraut's...