Thomas Wendt

Possessing the Others Future: To Die and To Be

How can the event that cannot be grasped still happen to me? What can the others relationship with a being, and existent, be? How can the existent exist as mortal and nonetheless persevere in its personality, preserve its conquest over the anonymous there is, the subjects mastery, the conquest of its subjectivity? How can a being enter into relation with the other without allowing its very self to be crushed by the other? (Levinas, Time and the Other, 76) Such questions represent one of the essential inquiries of Levinass project: how does one retain subjectivity in the face of the other who continually threatens to destroy it? In this ethical situation, the subject must defend against its own death while asserting its influence on the otherthat is, to maintain the sense of purpose and progression that, according to Levinas, defines the subject as such, but also, in an extreme attempt at mastery, attempt to possess the other. One must maintain the fine balance between self-sustainment and mastery of the external. Levinass analysis provides a means of understanding, or beginning to understand, Meursaults actions in The Stranger. Meursault is faced with the threatening other, and in attempt to protect his own subjectivity, he murders the other, thus maintaining his own status as a subject; however, this act of murder has significance beyond physical death, significance that points to and, in some ways, affirms Levinass analysis of what it means to be faced with the other and the subjects desire for self-preservation, leading to active mastery over the others future. Levinas identifies death with the loss of potential to act and to engage in an active mastery of the self in relation to the world. Death is the limit of the subjects virility, the moment in which we are no longer able to be able. It is exactly thus that the subject loses its very mastery as a subject. (Levinas, Time, 74) For Levinas, death is more than the death of the 1

physical body; it occurs on an ontological level with the extent to which the subject is able to act upon the world. One can be ontologically dead without being physically dead in the sense that, in reaction to the presentation of the other, the subject is immobilized into a state of inertia. Death is devolution into passivity, a state in which the subject is unable to be ablei.e., all potentiality is lost in the moment when the subject becomes passive in relation to the Other. In this way, the subject is defined by the ability to act; without this ability, the subject is no longer defined as such. Death is complete passivity, but it is unclear whether passivity is necessarily death: perhaps a passive state is transitory, that one can move between passivity and activity, making that temporary state of passivity analogous to a death without finality. What is important is that death takes the active subject and forces passivity onto it; at the moment of death, the subject is stripped of agency and made passive through the force of the Other.1 Levinas proposes somewhat of an extreme notion of the others role in the subjects existence. The other plays the part of a diametric opposite to the subject, completely absent of any optimistic notions of the interconnectedness of individuals: [T]he other is in no way another myself, participating with me in a common existence. The relationship with the other is not an idyllic and harmonious relationship of communion, or a sympathy through which we put ourselves in the others place; we recognize the other as resembling us, but exterior to us; the relationship with the other is a relationship with a Mystery. (Levinas, Time, 75) In this way, the other is a resemblance but not a copy; it is like us in the sense that it shares some of the same qualities, but it is not necessarily connected to the subject in any substantial way. This radical externality is precisely what defines the other as other. Thus, Levinas dismisses any philosophical notion of the other as an extension of the self, as a connected being insofar as harmony is necessary for life to be meaningful. The subject constantly seeks to

I am differentiating between the other and the Other in the Lacanian sense that the Other represents the external world whereas the other is an identifiable agent within the external world.

incorporate the otherthis vast, unknowable aspect of reality that is both fleeting and threateninginto the world of the self. One seeks to incorporate the unknowable other, the Mystery, into individual consciousnessin effect, to internalize the radically externalnot because the other is a part of the self but because the subject seeks to make it such. Perhaps this is the work of the modern subject2: to find meaning through the work of implicitly relating every object of analysis to the self, while explicitly maintaining the lens of empiricism and objective knowledge. In the case of Meursault, such an attempt results in the murder of the other. The impetus for the murder appears as anger or hatred paired with the confrontation of absurdity: Meursault simply does not care. It is apparent, however, that something else is happening at the point of the actual murder. If Meursault kills the man simply because that particular action is no other action is better or worse, then the anxiety with which he describes the situation would not be present. Meursaults choice of words to describe both his thoughts leading up to the murder and the his physical senses are ones that signify pain and anxiety, including throbbing, cutting, stabbed, stinging, reel, split, tensed, squeezed, sharp, deafening, etc. (Camus, 59) Meursault would not express the amount of anxiety he does over the murder if it were simply an action tantamount to any other action. Something else is at work here. He is attempting to incorporate the other into his own subjectivity by destroying it, thus defending against the threat of the other. Violence operates as a means of mastering the other in a manner that one cannot perform on the self. One cannot master the self through violence to the extent that is causes physical death; but insofar as the other is inherently disconnected from the self, the

I hesitate to use a phrase that is often aimlessly and arbitrarily used in academic settings, a phrase that has almost lost its definition; however, I mean it quite specifically to mean the post-Enlightenment individual who is steeped in notions of finding Truth in the empirical world.

subject can murder the other without threatening the self. In the sense of such radical ontology, the murder is justified on some level. In this sense, Levinass examination of death opens a theoretical space in which to defend Meursaults actions, at least on the level of subject and object positioning. In his confrontation of the other, Meursault is faced with the possibility of forced passivity to the external world. The other presents itself as proof of Meursaults constitutive lack insofar as the other is something that the subject perceived as an external part of the selfalthough, according to Levinas, this is merely on the level of perception, not of realitythat one attempts to internalize once again. In other words, the other presents itself as a lost object of desire.3 In this conception, however, the object of desire always appears as a threatening objectan object that the subject wishes to attain but risks its own agency in that very attainment. For Levinas, this risk manifests itself as the loss of the potentiality of mastery: This end of mastery indicates that we have assumed existing in such a way that an event can happen to us that we no longer assume, not even in the way we assume eventsbecause we are always immersed in the empirical world. (Levinas, Time, 74) Meursault attempts to master the empirical world by mastering, or killing, the other. His external reality, particularly the sun, plays an important role in the execution of the murder. Meursault cites the sun burning his forehead and eyes directly prior to the murder (Camus, 5859), and this imposition of the empirical world, over which he has no control, influenced him to act without considerationnot because the action was justified, but because the extremity of the external physical world evoked an active response against it. In a sense, the other is merely a proximal substitute for the untamable Other.

This notion is quite close to both Hegels and Lacans ideas on the function of the other. Although both these philosophers influence the present ideas, constrictions of space in the current essay prevent further elaboration.

Meursaults action is encompassed in the notion that he, as a desiring subject, wants both to die and to be. (Levinas, Time, 78) The murderous act symbolizes his urge to preserve his own being in the light of a threatening other; by eliminating the other, he sustains his existence as an agent in a world of perceived freedom. At the same time, however, murder also forces an acknowledgement of his own mortality through the absurdity of the murder itself. Through the act of murdering the other with little or no justification, Meursault inadvertently elucidates the fickle nature of his own existence: if one can eliminate the other with such ease and lack of remorse, then the absurd world can certainly turn that action back on the self. Such a paradoxas much as paradox can even be defined as such within this textis solved or at least decreased in effect by the role time: [I]t is possible to infer from this situation of death where the subject no longer has any possibility of grasping, another characteristic of existence with the other. The future is what is in no way grasped. The exteriority of the future is totally different from spatial exteriority precisely through the fact that the future is absolutely surprising. [] The other is the future. The very relationship with the other is the relationship with the future. It seems to me impossible to speak of time in a subject alone, or to speak of a purely personal duration. (Levinas, Time, 76-77) The question of grasping links death and the other insofar as the subject is always reaching out to something external, feeling, grabbing, but is never able to pull anything back. It is a return of nothing, which places the subject in an unsettling relationship with his or her temporal future. The external is equated to both the future and the other; and when one reaches out for something but returns to nothing, one can only assume that the other, the future, is nothing. In this sense, it does not matter if one kills the other; however, if one were make an attempt to find meaning in absurdity,4 one could certainly equate killing the other to mastering the future. In the experience

Such a search for meaning in the absurd appears pointless at first, but this does not need to be the case. The philosophy of the absurd, at least according to Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, posits the pursuit of meaning not as an essential aspect of life but nonetheless one of individual importance.

of the other, one indirectly experiences deaththe unknowable, ungraspable future manifests itself in the empirical world literally in front of the individual. The subject, faced with his or her own death, assumes a defensive role against it, usually one much less drastic than Meursaults but nonetheless has potential to be such. In the sense that death is situated on a temporal plane, and the other represents the absolute future, the future that is completely unknowable, the other is essentially a presentation of the subjects own death in the form of the embodiment of the future; it is seeing the unknowable. Death and the other become the presence of the future in the present. (Levinas, Time, 79) Meursaults encounter with the other resulted in the presentation of his future existence, perhaps with the same amount of inertia and malaise as his current position, causing the extreme reaction against the physical manifestation of the unknowable. In such a presentation, the subject attempts to master the unknowable, to at least bring the unknowable within the realm of possible understanding; not all choose to destroy the unknowable, but to master it in some form. Meursaults act of killing the other equates to mastery through violence. In its destruction, the subject regains the agency lost through being in the presence of the threatening embodiment of the future.