The Ethics of Love: An Essay on James Joyce by Benjamin Boysen (review)

In this rich and learned study of James Joyce’s ethics, Benjamin Boysen demonstrates that love—in its infinite potential and multiplicity—is a psychological, philosophical, and ideological necessity. Placing Joyce in conversation with Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, and Luce Irigaray (among others), Boysen situates the author within a centuries-long attempt to grapple with the nature of love and language, while also showing that Joyce’s own understanding of love is crucial for living ethically in modernity. Boysen writes, “Joyce’s notion of love is … a replacement for or a successor to the religious, moralistic, or romantic love, which at best has become meaningless, at worst crippling” (34). Through a close reading of the entire oeuvre, Boysen suggests that an ethics of love via Joyce forces an acknowledgment that one can never possess what one truly desires; yet recognizing this dilemma is a way out of a crippling narcissism in that it permits an acknowledgment of the desire of the other. An ethics of love rectifies the warping of personal relationships engendered by ego. An ethics of love is a bulwark against the devastating effects of capitalist exploitation, religious dogma, and the collapse of metaphysics. An ethics of love, in other words, is a salve for the psychic wounds and philosophical questions raised by an awareness of our own isolation in the modern world, and much of Joyce’s own intellectual and emotional biography leads to this end. (Full disclosure: many of Boysen’s arguments echo my own, and he cites my work throughout this book.)

Boysen’s “essay” resides within the tradition of the genre exemplified by philosophers and humanists: it is a wide-ranging discourse bringing together numerous threads and texts in order to illuminate a topic. Boysen begins with what he calls an “Amorous Overture,” which, as the chapter title suggests, raises the notes and themes to be considered throughout his entire work. The “overture” lays a philosophical foundation for one section comprised of readings of Joyce’s early writings as well as two substantial additional sections: one on Ulysses and one on Finnegans Wake. Beginning with Plato’s Symposium, Boysen takes difference as a fundamental premise for his Joycean ethics of love. He writes, “Love is an attempt to assimilate the otherness of the other, paradoxically to possess the other as a free subject, and finally to be oneself and the other simultaneously” (28). Thus, love is predicated on negation, on identification within negation, and on a radical willingness to inhabit an in-betweenness called forth by an embracing of heterogeneity.

The heterogeneity that is a part of love is also a part of language or what Boysen calls the “textual infinity of meaning-layers” (35); this capacity of language renders the loving subject capable of representing the beloved other because, by paying attention to the multivalent quality of language, one resists the “narcissistic and ideal, unequivocal unity of meaning” (41), and thus resists the attempt to impose one unequivocal “reading” on the beloved other. The doubling and difference integral to Joyce’s love are also part of his language, a point that comes to full fruition in the final section on the Wake. Boysen points out that an acceptance of such radical negativity is a necessary—and, for Joyce, “welcome”—feature of modernity, coming as it does with the collapse of dogma and metaphysics (54). Mutual heterosexual attraction can therefore be stripped of its associations with “beastly” sensuality and sin as well as the insistence upon it being a purely spiritual good. The difference inherent in the sexes is made part of a love that embraces the physical and the spiritual, the tender and the sensuous (55). Finally, the primacy placed on that heterosexual relationship—Giordano Bruno’s coincidentia oppositorum¹—is essential for Joyce’s ethics of love, for there must be two who fuse (“twone,” as written in Finnegans Wake—3.12) while also...