The great Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi famously wondered whether he was a man who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man. It is helpful to remember this anecdote when thinking about Levinas’s suggestion that “the whole of philosophy is only a meditation of Shakespeare.” As several contributors to this volume point out, the genitive “of” (de in French) is ambiguous: was Levinas saying that philosophy is a meditation on Shakespeare, or that philosophy is a meditation by Shakespeare? Perhaps, like Zhuangzi, he was wondering whether he was a philosopher dreaming he was Shakespeare, or Shakespeare dreaming he was a philosopher.
Like so many philosophers, Levinas was fascinated by Shakespeare. One passage that especially fascinated him was the remark that Banquo makes immediately after the witches vanish in Act 1, scene 3 of Macbeth: “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, / And these are of them.” (1.3.79-80) As Hilaire Kallendorf and Claire Katz point out in their essay, Levinas cites these words several times over the course of his career. In 1947 he compares being’s insinuation in nothingness to “bubbles of the earth” (les bulles de terre) (Existence and Existents, 57), and in 1965 he uses the same phrase to describe the insinuation of the face into being. (“Phenomenon and Enigma,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, 70) Finally, in a Talmudic reading published in 1977, he characterizes the sacred (le sacré) as “bubbles of Nothing in things.” (Nine Talmudic Readings, 141)
What exactly are these bubbles of the earth, and how can they signify so many different things for Levinas? Let us briefly examine the series:
(1) insinuation of being in nothing
(2) insinuation of the face in being
(3) insinuation of nothing in being
At first glance, (1) and (3) appear to be diametrically opposed. According to (1), Banquo’s bubbles are bubbles of being: like the spawn of a spontaneous generation, they literally appear out of nowhere. According to (3), however, the bubbles are bubbles of nothing that flicker in and out of being. Perhaps we can resolve this apparent contradiction by considering Banquo’s comparison of bubbles of the earth to bubbles of the water. Bubbles of the water are made not of water but of air. Of what are bubbles of the earth made? Being? Nothing? Or something else?
Perhaps the correct answer is fire. This would be in keeping with the witches’ chant, “Double, double, toil and trouble; / Fire burn and cauldron bubble.” (4.1.10-11) It would also round out the series of metaphysical elements:
(bubbles of the) water: air
(bubbles of the) earth: fire
For Heraclitus, fire was the most basic of the four elements. Fire was also a symbol or principle of becoming. Bubbles made of fire would be in a state of perpetual becoming. As such, they would involve both the insinuation of being in nothing and the insinuation of nothing in being. Far from contradicting each other, senses (1) and (3) would coincide.
Another way to explain the connection between senses (1) and (3) has to do with sense (2)—the radically different notion that Banquo’s bubbles involve the insinuation of the face in being. Beyond the ontological categories of being, nothing, and becoming, a face signifies the transcendence of the good. Its appearance within being—its transcendence within immanence—is essentially evanescent. It is, as Levinas says, “immediately reduced to nothing, breaking up like the ‘bubbles of the earth.’” (“Phenomenon and Enigma,” 70)
These bubbles are not made of fire. They are made of words. They say something, though what they say is immediately dispersed, leaving behind the residue of something said. Understood this way, the sense of Banquo’s bubbles differs markedly from sense (3), the insinuation of nothing in being in the experience of the sacred. For Levinas, sacredness is fake transcendence. It is the sheen of the nothing that is the “obverse” of being: bubbles signifying nothing.
Bubbles of the sacred are made of fire. If they represent the insinuation of nothing in being, they can just as easily represent the insinuation of being in nothing. Once again, the difference between sense (1) and sense (3) turns out to be unimportant. This is confirmed by a passage from Levinas’s Prison Notebooks in which he remarks that Hamlet “suffers from the insinuation of nothingness within being or of being within nothingness.” (Carnets de captivité, 174) The word “or” (ou) suggests that the two alternatives are fundamentally interchangeable.
Had the poet Paul Celan translated Macbeth into German, as he did twenty-one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, he might have forged one of his characteristic compounds to render “The earth hath bubbles” as Es gibt Erdblasen: “There are earthbubbles.” In French this could be translated as Il y a des bulles-terrestres. As Peter Szondi points out, Celan’s composite words are generally ambiguous. (Celan Studies, 66) They are “equivocators” that “palter with us in a double sense.” (Macbeth, 5.8.20) This is true of “earthbubbles.”
On the one hand, the statement Il y a des bulles-terrestres names the condition of the il y a: the inescapability of existence, whether understood as the insinuation of being in nothing or the insinuation of nothing in being. On the other hand, Il y a des bulles-terrestres signifies signification: the opposite (or other) of a “tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” (5.5.26-28) Banquo’s remark, “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has,” hovers between these two senses.
Earthbubbles of various sorts abound in Of Levinas and Shakespeare: “To See Another Thus.” In his inaugural essay, Richard Cohen notes that while other Shakespeare scholars have called attention to the “reality of Shakespeare’s world,” Levinas reveals “the even deeper link that binds the true to the good.” As several other contributors point out, this link is indirectly indicated by the way it goes missing in King Lear, the play from which this volume draws its subtitle.
For Sandor Goodhart, Lear is an old man suffering from hysterica passio, the “mother” swelling up toward his heart. Instead of welcoming the “gestation of the other” in himself, Lear protects himself from it, insisting that he is a man more sinned against than sinning. Ann Astell takes Lear to decline from an “unwise Solomon” to “another Job.” She distinguishes the play’s horizontal axis of narcissistic rivalry from its vertical axis of ethical transcendence. The two axes converge in the character of Edgar, the unaccommodated man whose exposure on the heath awakens Lear’s pity. For Kent Lehnhof, Cordelia signifies ethical transcendence by “disincarnating” God: her acts are “holy” (saint) rather than sacred.
Just as Astell discerns two axes in Lear, so Geoffrey Baker distinguishes two trajectories in The Merchant of Venice: Exilic wandering and Odyssean circulation. Yet just as Goodhart shows that for Levinas the Exilic journey from self to other allows for a return to an expanded sense of self as being-for-another, so Baker explains how Shakespeare’s play calls into question conventional oppositions between Jews and Greeks, Jews and Christians, exchange and gift-giving, law and mercy.
Kallendorf and Katz, in addition to tracking Levinas’s earthbubbles, read the knocking at the gate in Macbeth as “an allegory of the Other’s demand for recognition.” Thomas de Quincey famously argued that the knocking signifies the retreat of horror (“On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” The London Magazine, October 1823), but for Kallendorf and Katz it anticipates the call, expressed by Macduff, to “countenance” horror. Something similar could be said of the knocking in the final scene of Othello: Emilia’s cry at the door, “My lord, my lord! (5.2.84) signifies the entrance of the third party and the demand for justice.
Steven Shankman also deals with the passage from horror to responsibility, not least in his reference to Franz Rosenzweig’s invocation of the “‘word and fire’ of the celestial Chariot of Ezekiel’s vision.” (Here word and fire both belong to the order of signification.) Shankman shows that Levinas’s distinction between the “superfluxion of the superfluous” (la superfluxion du superflu) and the giving of bread “taken out of one’s own mouth” derives from Lear’s awakening to the suffering of others (“Poor naked wretches…”). He concludes that Lear dies of the mother that eventually reaches his heart.
Turning from drama to narrative poetry, Sean Lawrence reads Venus and Adonis as a cautionary tale about the possessiveness of concupiscent love. Because her love is violent, Venus can neither convince Adonis to procreate nor transform his dead body into something immortal, as Ovid’s Venus does. In a similar vein, Donald Wehrs shows how two of Shakespeare’s romances, Pericles and Cymbeline, distinguish types of affection whose difference had not been discernible in the world of Titus Andronicus. Tamora’s fierce love of kin reappears in Dionyza and the Queen, but it is contrasted with the other-directed love of Marina and Imogen, the surrogate daughters they attempt to kill.
Tamora reappears in David Goldstein’s startling comparison between the cannibal meal in Titus and the plein air banquet in As You Like It. As he explains in lines that I cannot resist quoting: “both [plays] attempt to deal with the invented problem of the vagina dentata by structuring a meal to defuse the threat. The difference between the tragedy and the comedy isn’t the philosophical issues at stake, but rather the solutions to those issues. Cannibal banquet? No thanks, I’ll have the fruit cup. But I’ll eat it down here in my man cave.”
Goldstein is referring to Orlando, who eventually learns to eat civilly with both men and women. At the end of As You Like It, it is the melancholy Jaques who heads back to his (or rather the Duke’s) man cave. Moshe Gold compares Jaques’ speech about the Seven Ages of Man to a Mishnah in the Pirkei Avot about the stages of religious education. Gold finds that Jaques misses an opportunity—both in the speech itself and in the blessings he offers each of the marrying couples—to teach his listeners how to learn from one another as they grow older together.
This observation is in keeping with Goldstein’s representation of Jaques as a Montaignean skeptic with a “darker purpose.” Unlike Levinas, for whom skepticism bespeaks inspiration, Jaques is a burster of bubbles. He is more inclined to scoff at the soldier “seeking the bubble reputation” (2.7.152) than he is to marvel at the equivocal words of three weird sisters. Levinas, like the child in Millais’ painting Bubbles, was a marveler. If it sometimes seems to me that his entire philosophy is a meditation—or dream—of earthbubbles, this is why.
Together, the papers in this marvelous collection reveal the significance of Shakespeare for Levinas and the significance of Levinas for Shakespeare. At a time of keen interest in Shakespeare and philosophy, it will be welcomed by philosophers and literary critics alike.