Being Intrigued: How the
Unttling Writing of Ethics Precedes
the Ethics of Identity
Joshua Schuster
University of Western Ontatio
Riera, Gabriel. Intrigues: From Being to the Other. New Y ork: Fordham UP, 2006. xii, 247 pp. $55.00 cloth.
Aiming to shake up the field of the ethical turn in criticism, Gabriel Riera’s book argues that repeated categorizations and localizations of the other have, for the most part, the cumulative effect of exhausting ethics. Things went wrong when the task of criticism was equated with staging the face to face with the other, assuming that reprentation, cogni-tion, and communicative action was adequate to this encounter. Riera provides detailed clo readings of Levinas to show paradoxically how the other is the first one to speak, yet also the one that cannot be reduced to the discursive. In a patient analysis that wends through Heidegger’s ethics of the unsayable in poetry and Blanchot’s quest for a n
eutral writing that aims for radical non-appropriation, Riera gives a compelling account of how ethical theory, following Levinas, must take riously the intrigue of a writing that is neither wholly discursive nor poetic silence.
Keywords: ethical criticism / Emmanuel Levinas / Gabriel Riera / intrigue T wentieth-century theorists are quickly becoming read as that century’s late
modernists. Gabriel Riera has written a book that situates itlf somewhere between late modernism and theory. Riera tells the theoretical narrative of how “the question of writing,” in Maurice Blanchot, Martin Heidegger, and Emmanuel Levinas, has become “the hinge between ethics and aesthetics” (191). Riera knows that “writing” as a literary and conceptual problem is burdened by anxieties of being both too abstract (consider how late modernist texts are often about keeping the waning desire to write, as in Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on”) and too concrete, in that when it aims for an identity with its lf-prentation, it ends up implicitly affirming the intellectual dominance of the writer over the material.1
教师节英语怎么说>matey什么意思
How the Unttling Writing of Ethics Precedes the Ethics of Identity 151 At this point, most critics will just bracket this anxiety and turn to strategies of clo reading, inspecting the materiality of writing, o
r its historical provenance, or its generic specificity. Instead, Riera propos that writing invested in any aesthetic strategy must presuppo an ethical problem, since the “other” that it contains can-not be determined in cognitive, discursive or reprentational ways. But how does one write non-discursively? Is there really such a thing as writing that can undo its reprentational force? Is this the utmost limit definition of writing? Given that so much violence occurs today whether one es the face of the enemy or not, it ems to be a hopeful myth (which nonetheless makes for riveting cinema) that looking at someone’s face prevents someone from killing that person. How then can one asrt that non-reprentational writing have anything to do with the reality of ethics?taiwane
Riera makes a cogent argument that “writing,” in so far as it questions its own reprentational confidence, has everything to do with the fate of ethics. Indeed, Riera argues that it was the “ethical turn” in literary criticism itlf that misd the opportunity to consider how ethics involves a relentless critique of identity. And yet the more the “other” is located, named, and categorized, the less room there is for ethics to do its work at the level of question and surpri and relation. As Riera es it, this culminates in a problem of overu or putting all one’s eggs in the basket of empowerment through nominating one other after another.
[T]he proliferation of the other, its recurrence in current debates, is a sign of its
exhaustion, or of its final demi. Becau of knowledge’s drive to make an inventory
circle是什么意思of its main features and to put them at the rvice of communicative action and rep-hsdpa
rentation, little ems to remain of what the other meant to convey — what escapes
the principle of identity and identification. It is as if, paradoxically, the more we speak
insistsabout the other, the more we yield to the same” (5).
Riera is rather cagey about with whom he wants to argue. He only supplies a footnote indicating that he has in mind Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak and only notes their books from the late 1980s to early 1990s, but he never deals with their work cloly, nor address the steps their work might actually take to positing a writing after modernism that resists the confirmation of the same. This is not to say that Riera has ulessly dismisd the interlocutors outright, but there is much to consider in the difference between positing and positioning. At what point does claiming an ethical turn, even one of subverting identity, become the very form in which identity is confirmed as the only game in town? Riera sharply asrts: “There is no place here for a question such as ‘can the subaltern speak?’Indeed, the other is the first to speak” (12). This bold statement makes n o
nly in the context of Riera’s discussion of how speech already implies an inter-locutor, that is, an other who can speak before me. Philosophically, what prevents me from hearing the other is if I assume my lf-consciousness to be generated from the same being and returning to the same, as in the lf-certainty posited by Descartes. Of cour, socially, people are prevented from speaking in countless ways that have little to do with making room for non-identity. Ethical criticism is
152Journal of Modern Literature Volume 32, Number 4 always vacillating between the two modes of critique; and since Riera does not address social institutions or practical humanitarian projects (unlike Levinas), one cannot say how transformative the concept of “intrigue” might be outside of theory.milkthistle
rill rillHowever, Riera should be given credit for offering a compelling narrative showing the importance of a Levinasian “intrigue” as linked to ethical encoun-ters. The story of how uncanny writing about “writing” (uncanny becau of the inevitable doubling, reversing, returning, shadowing, etc.) became a major trope of theory in the last century parallels the discussion of ethics as a “relationship without relationship.” This is where the sometimes ethereal tropes of the outside, the absolutely exterior, the “un-story,” the enigma, the “voice from the other shore,” and the “relation of infinity,” so prevalent in Blanchot, Heidegger and Levinas, show themlves to be about ethics as much as they are about th
e limits of lan-guage. Riera nicely explicates Heidegger’s understanding of poetry as “bring[ing] language to language” (43) which shows nothing or no object but merely “t[s] forth being” (64). Poetry is the esnce of the artwork for Heidegger, but when it comes down to it, the poem itlf, in its material, written state does not count for much; for the esnce of poetry is the wisp of the poetic as such, sheer rapturous bringing-forth of the “primal burst of being in its inaugural gui (phusis)” (64). Indeed, the poetic esnce inside the poem is un-narratable and has no word (is pre-diction). Riera zeroes in on the balance: “The poet is neither a visionary nor a foreteller; the sacred he announces opens the interval of a suspension of time. It indicates the region in which men’s dwelling can unfold” (64–65). This is where writing paradoxically condemns itlf to silence: “The poet thus speaks in the poem but at the price of a terrible mutilation, since he gives his voice to what cannot speak, to what is unnamable” (65).
As Riera shows, Blanchot’s work of the 1940s and 1950s endlessly circulates around this crisis, tempting nihilism and passive speechlessness. This leads him in the 1960s to argue for the “unworking” (désoeuvrement) of writing that “accom-plishes a double bracketing of its own certainty and intentional consciousness” (160). But if art endlessly reiterates its own failure of the unnamable, why bother with it at all? This question is central if we want to understand how Levinas mounts a gra
nd opposition to all things Heideggerian, including art. In Levinas’s 1948 essay “Reality and Its Shadow,” art is the shadow, the mute physical object stuck in time, and not worth much attention in philosophy that must attend to the changing reality of time. Though Levinas cites poetry in the opening lines of his first large work Totality and Infinity (1961), he makes no substantial ethical claims for the power of art or poetic writing. Always spiting Heidegger, he allows a special role for technology as a necessary other for human artifice to be possible. Thus there is no straightforward critical application of Levinasian terms to literature; using Levinas to locate the other in the text implicitly privileges poetic prowess and the power of reprentation that Levinas eschews. Riera’s work is most insightful when it picks up Levinas’s return to problems of aesthetics and address his essays on Blanchot from the early 1970s at the time of Otherwi than Being or Beyond Esnce. This later work not only shows a dramatic rush to theorize an ethics of language, but
How the Unttling Writing of Ethics Precedes the Ethics of Identity 153 also evidences a peculiar stylistic development: in a writing that is not discour but “revelation,” ntences frequently interrupt, cut and retie themlves in “ex-position.” Riera’s story ends with a claim that Levinas had to u Blanchot’s late work as a model of a new writing produced in a “post-aesthetic” way, one that does not inscribe the work either into reprentational categories or poetic silence. It is indeed a writi
ng where the saying exceeds the content of the said, to u Levinas’s terms. Instead of the unnamable, one has the saying, the pre-discursive revelation of the face of the other. This would bring Levinas to consider that the writings of ethics and aesthetics are not commensurate but cannot do without each other.
Riera’s book does not apply this lesson to other works of literature and it is questionable how portable this story is to modernists’experimentation with non-intentional form and “the work.” I would recommend for interested readers to skip to the “Postface” right after the “Introduction” to have a better n of the overall trajectory of the book, as Riera sometimes los the reader in figuring out how to tell his own paradoxical story of the “unstory” or the “non-reading.” On the whole, I find Intrigues to be insightful and engaging. It may not rewrite ethical criticism as fully beyond the ken of “calculation, anticipation, identification, and assimilation”
(9), but it does put forth an important argument about how the writing of ethics encounters an ethical writing that is itlf intriguing, and does not remain stuck in the endless dialectical reversals of binaries like lf/other.
Note
print screen1. See Walter Benn Michaels’s The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (2004). In it, Michaels fus authorial intentionality with defending the responsibility of the writing act — rather than the reading strategy — which he melodramatically equates to having the means to truly deal with social inequality, versus privileging the “active reader” (really all readers), which ultimately forces one to support the Bush regime as a valid reading of the “end of history.”
Notes on Contributors 155 and other modernist writers, including Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf. She is currently working on an article about footnotes in critical editions of Dubliners.
视野英语
DAVID JAMES (D.James@nottingham.ac.uk) is lecturer in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. His ongoing work on narrative aesthetics and cultural geography is reprented in Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space (2008), and in his forthcoming co-edited collection, New Versions of Pastoral: Post-Romantic, Modern, and Contemporary Respons to the Tradition (2009), which traces the envi-ronmental contexts and practices of bucolic writing from the early nineteenth century to the prent day.He is currently working on a monograph exploring the afterlives of modernist practices in the postwar novel, while editing a book of essays titled Legacies of Modernism: Historicizing Contempor
ary Fiction.
KYLA SCHULLER () is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Her disrtation, “Sentimental Science,” investigates the relationships between nti-mentalism and evolution in multi-ethnic literary culture, scientific practice, and social reform movements from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth century. Her essay on Moby-Dick is forthcoming from Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies.
JOSHUA SCHUSTER ( jschust@uwo.ca) is an assistant professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. He has essays published in Other Voices, Open Letter, and Journal of Modern Literature. He is currently working on a book manu-script called Organic Radicals: Poetry, Environmentalism, and American Modernity. DAVID SHERMAN (dsherman@brandeis.edu), assistant professor in the Depart-ment of English and American Literature at Brandeis University, has recently published essays on the poetics of ethical obligation in Woolf, Faulkner and Geof-frey Hill. He is currently completing a book, In a Strange Room: Corps, Sovereign Power, and the Modernist Imagination, on the changing nature of burial obligations in modernity.
DOROTHY STRINGER (stringd@temple.edu) teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia. Her mo
nograph, “Not Even Past”: Race, Historical Trauma and Subjectivity in Faulkner, Larn, and Van Vechten is forthcoming in Fall 2009 from Fordham University Press. She is currently at work on a new project addressing the commodity form and international trade in African American fiction by Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Gayl Jones and others.
KELLY S. W ALSH (kswalsh@u.washington.edu)is a Ph.D. candidate in com-parative literature at the University of Washington in Seattle. His disrtation
