On Being Too Deeply Loved

This essay considers the competing claims of the ideology of erotic merging on the one hand and the ideal of developing a clearly bounded self on the other. I argue that a "moral negotiation" with a work of literature (Othello) can create a fruitful confrontation with this familiar tension. The rewards for such criticism are both moral and literary: moral, since literature facilitates modes of moral reflection that cannot be activated by employing non-literary moral reflection; literary, because a moral dialogue with literary texts is not only possible but also aesthetically enriching. On the theoretical front, this essay thus continues what has been called "the literary turn" in moral philosophy, which supplements the work of other philosophers of literature by highlighting the capacity of the literary work to form a critique of an embedded ideology (in my reading, a prevalent erotic ideology). Finally, I relate ethical criticism to the current debate over cultural studies and the anxieties associated with the disappearance of the literary. I argue that taking an "ethical turn" enables literary criticism to claim an important distinctiveness in contrast to other modalities of cultural critique.

Then Apollo turned their faces about, and pulled their skin together from the edges over what is now called the belly. . . . For the rest, he smoothed away most of the puckers and figured out the breast with some such instruments as shoemakers use in smoothing the wrinkles of leather on the last. . . . Not one on hearing this, we are sure, would demur to it or would be found wishing for anything else: each would unreservedly deem that he had been offered just what he was yearning for all the time, namely, to be so joined and fused with his beloved that the two might be made one.

Plato, Symposium (190e5-192e12; pp. 139, 145)

When one goes beyond the surface structure of Aristophanes' fable in the Symposium, probably the most famous allegory in the philosophy of love, it is impossible to reduce its meaning simply to erotic yearning or the ideal of love as merging. Aristophanes also suggests that one only becomes a subject upon entering an erotic union; he goes on to cast the union in terms of a necessary bodily dimension (though the meaning of the union for the lovers is not exhausted by it). But for my concerns in this essay, the most important feature of the fable is that the union is never perfect; there always remains a barrier that prevents complete merging. Plato has his lovers trying to come to terms with these borders, wishing for their disappearance. The story thus not only formulates the ideal of erotic merging but also posits a built-in constituent that prevents it. The contemporary urgency of this last paradox does not require too much comment. We speak today of a self-contradictory cultural outlook (common to us and the ancient Greeks with their ideal of forming character) that privileges the clearly bounded self as a breaking off from symbiosis but also cultivates the ideal of falling in love as merging. This essay is about this paradox. More specifically, it is about the manner and the meaning of Shakespeare's presentation of it in Othello.

I read Othello as a detailed portrayal of an erotic refusal on Othello's part. This reading is continuous with the corpus of scholarship on the play that (mostly implicitly) avoids the assumption that Iago's insinuations suffice to explain Othello's actions. Arthur Kirsch followed F. R. Leavis in highlighting the way in which Shakespeare has Iago simply echoing Othello's own words in the "temptation scene," thereby emphasizing that "the process we are witnessing is fundamentally an internal one" (1978: 733). As for attributing the tragic outcome to Iago's demonic rhetorical capacities which Othello is supposedly helpless to resist, this option is no longer persuasive since, as Leo Kirschbaum notes, Iago tells four different people (including, apart from the unimpressive Cassio and Emilia, the play's fool, Roderigo) that Desdemona is unchaste, and the only one of these who seems to believe him is Othello (1944: 158). Cavell (1987: 133...