One can exchange everything between beings, except existing.
—Levinas (TO 42)
Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice has been a critical battlefield.1 As Kiernan Ryan, among others, has pointed out, earlier criticism invested itself largely in the debate over whether, in writing The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare was in the moral right or wrong, in the guise of timeless humanitarian or myopic anti-Semite. Such concerns are problematic in different ways, either precariously perched on shifting platitudes of right and wrong, or nostalgic for unrecoverable moments of the author’s deepest intentions. Newer readings, however, have abandoned these quagmires in favor of other, perhaps more immanent, questions; berating the earlier criticism, and rather than merely attempting either to save or indict Shakespeare, Ryan writes, “The Merchant of Venice operates at a level beyond the simplistic polarities of such sentimental moralism.… The point lies not in the vindication of the Jew at the expense of the Christian, or of the Christians at the expense of the Jew, but in the critique of the structural social forces which have made both what they are, for better and for worse” (21). Ryan thus isolates the societal hands that have shaped the characters in Shakespeare’s play, but still subtler energies claim a commensurate role in the organization of The Merchant of Venice, structures of knowledge that were founded long before Shakespeare’s Venice and that cannot be said to have disappeared today.
The ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas has not yet been brought to bear on The Merchant of Venice, and one ought to find this surprising for several reasons. First, Levinas’s work—like that of many in his generation, a “critique of the totality”—was born of frustration with a very historically real anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust, this “political experience that we have not yet forgotten” (EI 78-79). Second, The Merchant of Venice has long been viewed as an interrogation of the construction and mistreatment of cultural others and categories of cultural otherness, and certainly Levinas has articulated well and at length at least one version of this problematic, and could even be said to have initiated some levels of the discussion. This paper will attempt just such a Levinasian reading, but with qualifications, for, while Levinasian ethics can obviously be profitably applied to The Merchant of Venice, my discussion hopes in turn to employ Shakespeare’s play to open Levinas’s thought in ways that have been generally overlooked by attending to motifs of circulation and donation, return and departure.2 The intrusion of other thinkers—such as Jacques Derrida, Michael Walzer, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno—will likewise serve these compatible dual ends, hopefully further enriching one of Shakespeare’s most consistently troubling plays by navigating a series of problematic binary oppositions comfortably ensconced for ages in criticism of the play, the “simplistic polarities” derided by Ryan above.
James Shapiro has also gestured toward these handy contrasts, and to reading strategies that rely “upon an unshaken belief in differences—of one suitor; of gold and silver from lead; of one form of venture capital from another; of Shylock from Antonio; of Belmont from Venice” (“Which is The Merchant here?” 270). These structures should not be ignored at all, but rather placed in sharper focus; as integral as they are to the play, and to the extent that the text insists on them, to dismiss them as “simplistic,” as Ryan does, might say more about our prevailing modes of reading them than about the play or its willful deployment of binaristic discourses and values placed explicitly in opposition to each other. The production, circulation, and negotiation of several of these binaries—including Judaism and Christianity, justice and mercy, outbound and homeward journeys, investments returned and lost, giving and taking—speak eloquently to the very “structural social forces” (Ryan’s words) that enable The Merchant of Venice.3 A Levinas-based reading of these structures and their prominent role in Shakespeare’s play can demonstrate to what great extent they are all interwoven and invested in each other, and in what manner rampant venture capital, simultaneously the pride and fall of Venice, is implicated at every step.
* * *
“Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida’s infamous critique of Levinas, will introduce the organizational motif of my discussion of The Merchant of Venice: a long tension envisioned between Hebraism and Hellenism. Derrida provides a conceptual genealogy for this dichotomoy that begins with Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), wends its way briefly through James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and is touched off again by Levinas’s Totality and Infinity (1961). Derrida’s parting shot in the essay, cited at length here, asks,
Are we Jews? Are we Greeks? We live in the difference between the Jew and the Greek, which is perhaps the unity of what is called history.… And does this strange dialogue between the Jew and the Greek, peace itself, have the form of the absolute, speculative logic of Hegel, the living logic which reconciles formal tautology and empirical heterology after having thought prophetic discourse in the preface to the Phenomenology of Mind? Or, on the contrary, does this peace have the form of infinite separation and of the unthinkable, unsayable transcendence of the other? To what horizon of peace [A l’horizon de quelle paix4] does the language which asks this question belong? From whence does it draw the energy of its question? Can it account for the historical coupling of Judaism and Hellenism? And what is the legitimacy, what is the meaning of the copula in this proposition from perhaps the most Hegelian of modern novelists: “Jewgreek is Greekjew. Extremes meet?” (153, emphases in original)5
This is Derrida’s response to Levinas’s alleged attempt to resuscitate metaphysics by dispensing with ontology from within the tradition of ontology. Derrida (insinuates that Levinas) equates metaphysics with Hebraism, and destructive ontology with the Hellenic philosophers and thus with western philosophy, built in its totalizing entirety on their foundations. I want to approach the Hebraism/Hellenism schema from a slightly different but certainly related direction, though, in terms that Levinas would doubtless appreciate, according to Derrida: Exodus and Odyssey (153 n92). The explication and complication of these two categories and how they could enrich a reading of The Merchant of Venice will basically give shape to this paper’s argument.
Indeed, the Exodus narrative is not alien to the British Renaissance. Jonathan Boyarin, in a chapter on “Reading Exodus into History,” builds off of Nicholas Howe’s Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England, indicating the Exodus narrative’s possible presence at the very cultural and mythic foundations of Shakespeare’s England: “Howe’s general thesis is that ‘the Anglo-Saxons … envisioned their migration from continent to island as a reenactment of the biblical exodus.’ Howe thus anchors the identification of the English with the Chosen People, and of the Emerald Isle[6] with the Promised Land, much further back than the sole emphasis on the Protestant intimacy with the Old Testament would suggest” (53). Drifting closer to Shakespeare’s own days, James Shapiro recalls that a “much repeated story, verified by court records and especially popular among sixteenth-century historians, describes how English sailors duped Jewish refugees into drowning in the Thames” during the thirteenth century Expulsion (Shakespeare and the Jews [hereafter SJ] 47). In this twisting of the Exodus story, which comprises most of Holinshed’s—Shakespeare’s own admired historian—account of the Expulsion, the familiar events are “ironically reversed in a narrative that turns exiled Jews into drowning Egyptians. Presumably,” Shapiro speculates, “the English have now supplanted the Jews as God’s chosen people.” Lorenzo, in The Merchant of Venice, similarly appropriates the Exodus story for himself and his merchant friends when he says to Portia and Nerissa, “Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way / Of starved people” (MV 5.1.294-295).
Boyarin refers bluntly to “a dichotomy between primitive, mythological, cyclical conception, and closeness to nature on one hand, and Israelite, historical linearism, and hostility to nature on the other” (43). One should protest here that the Odyssean hero’s relationship to nature can hardly be described as a “closeness”—it often assumes a far more destructive form. (An interrogation of the Odyssey narrative must wait until later, until Levinas’s thoughts on it have been introduced.) But Boyarin’s reading of the Exodus/ Odyssey dichotomy adjusts Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution, in which Walzer quite plainly offers the Exodus as “the crucial alternative” to narratives of circulation (one now sees in sharper relief the inroads to the capital of The Merchant), of going and returning, such as the Odyssey, and such as the Christian notion of man’s return to God. “The Exodus,” Walzer affirms, “bears no resemblance to those ancient tales of voyages and journeys that, whatever the adventure they include, begin and end at home … nor can it be called an odyssey, a long wandering such as Homer recounted, at the end of which wait wife and child (and ancient servant and faithful dog)” (11).7 But to shove this biblical schema somewhat forcibly into Levinasian terms, the Exodus can be seen as a movement from the space of the familiar or the same out into the uncharted and foreign territory of the other, an outward journey in which even the mere mention of return is unacceptable. It is curious that, while Levinas perhaps optimistically situates the Bible at the “confluence of different literatures” which all veer “toward the same essential content” (EI 115), Horkheimer and Adorno see Homer’s Odyssey as “the basic text of European civilization” (46). Homer’s epic is a dangerous text for Horkheimer and Adorno. They see it as representative of an Enlightenment epistemology very much at work in The Merchant of Venice, one that prizes unity, the comfort of the cultural same, and the return of what is sent out into circulation—including and especially invested capital.
The Odyssey’s discourse of otherness and sameness is also present in The Merchant of Venice, if only faintly, invoked by Launcelot Gobbo in conversation with Jessica: “Truly then I fear you are damn’d both by father and mother: thus when I shun Scylla (your father), I fall into Charybdis (your mother); well, you are gone both ways” (MV 3.5.14-17). Shylock, in this telling, is reduced to an othered, heroic impediment (Scylla) to be avoided or overcome. Unlike the outbound movement of Exodus, the Odyssey operates as if in a closed economy in obedience to the call of the same and in repudiation of the call of the other. Such a subjectivity, Levinas assures us, “comes from the home and returns to it, a movement of Odyssey where the adventure pursued in the world is but the accident of a return” (TI 176). This axiologically primary homeward aspiration stands in clear contrast to Levinas’s usual emphasis on “an ‘exit’ [sortie] toward the world” (EI 57); indeed, the same-directed, Odyssean paradigm opposes by its very nature Levinas’s other-directed metaphysical desire, the originary point of his ethics. “The metaphysical desire does not long to return,” he writes, but rather “tends toward something else entirely [tout autre chose], toward the absolutely other” (TI 33). The subtitle of Totality and Infinity is, appropriately, An Essay on Exteriority, and this encapsulates Levinas’s equation of ethical, other-oriented interpersonal relations, “where the same, gathered up in its ipseity as an ‘I,’ as a particular existent unique and autochthonous, leaves itself” (39, emphasis mine). Levinas’s emphasis on the journey of departure that does not seek its own origin again is given dubious voice in The Merchant of Venice by Gratiano, of all people:
Where is the horse that doth untread again
His tedious measures with the unbated fire
That he did pace them first?—all things that are
Are with more spirit chased than enjoy’d.
How like a younger or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay—
Hugg’d and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal she doth return
With over-weathered ribs and ragged sails—
Lean, rent, and beggar’d by the strumpet wind! (MV 2.6,10-19)
Keeping in mind that Gratiano is discredited almost before the play has begun—“Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing” (MV 1.1.114)—and repeatedly disparaged during the play, one still politely allows him and his associates in Shakespeare’s Venice this unflattering portrait of the homeward journey, for the play’s merchant class has successfully displaced its role in either outbound or returning leg of the commercial voyage. Shylock first calls our attention to this, vividly, when he catalogues the perils of mercantile shipping: “[S]hips are but boards, sailors but men, there be land-rats, and water-rats, water-thieves, and land-thieves, (I mean pirates), and then there is the peril of waters, winds, and rocks,” but there are no merchants (MV 1.3.21-24). In the Odyssean world of Venice’s outgoing and returning investments, the central role has been restricted to that of impotent spectator, like Marlowe’s Barabas, comfortably ensconced in his counting house, and glad when only a third of his ships return (The Jew of Malta 1.1.1-3).
Horkheimer and Adorno, in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, have rightly implicated Odyssean thinking in bourgeois separation from the labor of production. They share Levinas’s more basically ethical reservations, denigrating “the promise of the happy return” characteristic of Odyssey narrative, and reiterating that under the aegis of this return “the adventures of Odysseus are all dangerous temptations [Lockungen] removing the self from its logical course” (33, 47). Moving further, however, Horkheimer and Adorno pigeonhole Odysseus as a “proprietor” and read The Odyssey as an “entanglement of myth, domination, and labor”: “Odysseus is represented in labor. Just as he cannot yield to the temptation of self-abandonment, so, as proprietor, he finally renounces even participation in labor, and ultimately even its management, whereas his men—despite their closeness to things—cannot enjoy their labor because it is performed under pressure, in desperation, with senses stopped by force” (32, 35). Unlike the collective, communal effort of the Exodus, the Odyssey narrative invests itself entirely in the fate of one proprietor and, in so doing, confirms “that the title of hero is only gained at the price of an abasement and mortification of the instinct for complete, universal, and undivided happiness” (57). In this, Horkheimer and Adorno conclude, Odysseus embodies “the principle of capitalist economy,” the new instinct for competition that necessarily evolves into the zero-sum game depicted in The Merchant of Venice (61).8 “Were [Antonio] out of Venice,” Shylock speculates, “I can make what merchandise I will” (MV 3.1.119-120), an implication that one man’s fall will engineer another’s instant rise. Following his ruination at the end of the fourth act, he begs the Duke:
Nay, take my life and all, pardon not that,—
You take my house, when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house: you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live. (MV 3.1.372-375)
Recalling that Shylock has earlier spoken of his house as if it were his own flesh—“stop my house’s ears” (MV 2.5.34)—strengthens the appeal of this plea, which emphasizes one’s painful inability to survive any capital hindrance in the competitive marketplace of Venice. Shylock’s language, though, his use of the word “house,” may broaden his petition to include all Jews, when we remember Joshua’s use of the word (“me and my house” [Joshua 24:15], at the ending of the Biblical Exodus, no less) to denominate himself and all of his people, and the phrase “the house of Israel,” which first appears in Jeremiah 3:18.
It is thus hardly surprising that Levinas, in Totality and Infinity, equates war with commerce (222). The cockfight mentality of the marketplace evoked in The Merchant of Venice signals the onset of a new anti-heroic ontology—business as battle, but completely outside the older mythical conception of battle. The characters’ nostalgia for uncomplicated, pre-market epic heroism is rampant in the play, at several moments sentimental and melodramatic, as in the constant referring to Portia as the “golden fleece” of the Argonauts (MV 1.1.170, for example), and at other moments so wrong-headed that one is certainly in the presence of irony, as in the loving exchange between Jessica and Lorenzo that references perhaps every famously failed romance in the literature of antiquity.9 The text alludes clearly to its own awareness of disempowered notions of heroism; some twenty lines after cheering Bassanio on with a rowdy “go Hercules!” (MV 3.2.60), Portia devalues the allusion itself:
How many cowards whose hearts are all as false
As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins
The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars,
Who inward search’d, have livers white as milk?
(MV 3.2.83-86)
Gratiano reinvigorates the Argonautica imagery—calling us to Appolonius of Rhodes’ very quest-oriented, Odyssean mythography—following Bassanio’s successful suit at Belmont: “We are the Jasons, we have won the fleece!” (MV 3.2.240). In the decidedly un-heroic realm of Venetian commerce, however, there are no Jasons. Shapiro is correct to assert that heroic “hazarding has taken on a new meaning” in “the world of Belmont,” but incorrect to stop at Belmont, for this new and feeble hazarding is precisely the same sort practiced by the merchants of Venice and other centers of nascent capitalism (“Which is The Merchant?” 273). Indeed, Jacques Rancière has made similar intimations in his treatment of the “industrial lottery” of late-capitalist France (46). Morocco’s reflections on the random character of Portia’s Belmont “lott’ry” (MV 1.2.29) can be as readily adduced with regard to the climate of Venetian mercantile competition:
If Hercules and Lichas play at dice
Which is the better man, the greater throw
May turn by fortune from the weaker hand:
So is Alcides beaten by his rage,
And so may I, blind Fortune leading me,
Miss that which one unworthier may attain,
And die with grieving. (MV 2.1.32-38)
Risk is the rule, the new and anemic heroism that is more hazardous than heroic and no respecter of persons or “worth.”
The risk of hazarding consolidates, for Horkheimer and Adorno, the sacredness of capitalism and competition, and originates in The Odyssey. The justice of Odysseus’s rewards “was to be confirmed later on by bourgeois economics in the form of the concept of risk: the possibility of failure becomes the postulate of a moral excuse for profit” (62). If the danger involved (the uncertainty of the gambit or gamble) justifies the process and the profit, risk plays no smaller role in the definition of capital investment in The Merchant of Venice, so much so that the notion itself in the play is imbued with fear and distrust. The merchants of Venice are well apprised of the risks their capital runs in transit, and this anxiety is articulated from the outset of the work, as Salerio and Solanio interrogate Antonio on the grounds for his bourgeois malaise and ultimately conclude that his investments are the cause.
SALERIO: Your mind is tossing on the ocean,
There where your argosies with portly sail
Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood,
Or as it were the pageants of the sea,
Do over peer the petty traffickers
That cur’sy to them (do them reverence)
As they fly by them with their woven wings. (MV 1.1.8-14)
Antonio’s response offers insight into the wide casting of bets in the mercantile game, a vivid acknowledgement of the risk involved:
Believe me no, I thank my fortune for it—
My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Not to one place; nor is my whole estate
Upon the fortune of this present year:
Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad. (MV 1.1.41-45)
It is wrong to limit the discussion here to Antonio, however, for Shylock’s capital is equally as spread; just as Antonio must go to Shylock in order to assist Bassanio, Shylock, whose “present store” is deficient, presumably because it is invested elsewhere, must go to Tubal. The chain of borrowings widens the net of risk and investment, until it is stretched thinly indeed. As enthusiastic as the characters of The Merchant of Venice are in their capital pursuits and far-flung investments, the displaced risks involved do not pass unnoticed. Perhaps most disconcerting is the manner in which the danger is factored in, counted on as any other variable of business performance.
One might question how well-informed, studied, or calculated these gambles are. Indeed, such concerns figure curiously in Bassanio’s rhetoricized attempts to secure operating capital from Antonio for his pursuit of Portia. The best analogy to which Bassanio can direct his friend and investor highlights the utter caprice of the gambit:
In my school-days, when I had lost one shaft,
I shot his fellow of the self-same flight
The self-same way, with more advised watch
To find the other forth, and by adventuring both,
I oft found both. (MV 1.1.140-144)
This characterization contributes to the larger, often dubious, portrayal of the play’s slingers of investment capital; a more subtle stab at them unfolds itself in a careful imagistic repetition of Salerio’s that knocks Antonio, the Merchant of Venice himself, from any pedestal to which he may have pretended. I drew attention earlier to Salerio’s first lines, where he compliments Antonio’s fleet, as against the “petty traffickers” that do Antonio’s argosies reverence while flying by “with their woven wings” (MV 1.1.12, 1.1.14). This alone casts aspersions on those involved in the burgeoning trading scene around Venice, all emphasis on the supreme artificiality of the wings. However, Solario returns to this motif later when, answering Shylock’s accusations of having aided and abetted the forces that enabled Jessica’s flight, he glibly retorts, “That’s certain,—I (for my part) knew the tailor that made the wings she flew withal” (MV 3.1.24-25). The fabricated wings of the “petty traffickers” from the play’s first scene are thus linked directly to Antonio’s band of associates, and to the role Antonio himself plays in the flight of Jessica and Lorenzo as described by Venice’s chief gossips, Salerio and Solanio (see 2.8). The Merchant of Venice runs cool on the notion of investment and the company it has engendered, the company that Jessica joins and that readily accepts her. “And true she is,” marvels Lorenzo, “as she hath prov’d herself” (MV 2.6.55). She may be true to her new companions, perhaps, but their confidence is purchased with the betrayal of her own father, to whom she shows less respect than does even Launcelot Gobbo, the clown. Gobbo at the very least agonizes over his decision to leave Shylock, takes advice from a “conscience” who “counsel[s] well,” while Shylock’s own flesh and blood brings quick closure to an apparent bout of culturally-other self-loathing by simply escaping (MV 2.2.19-20).
Levinas is in many ways a theorist of investment, or rather—perhaps more precisely—a theorist against investment and the demands of economy.10 The commercial relation is a faceless one, leaving it outside of ethical interaction with the other and positioning it within the field of what Levinas terms “rhetoric,” speech which “approaches the other not to face him, but obliquely [pas de face, mais de biais]” (TI 70). The practice of commerce stands within the Levinasian notion of rhetoric, as against ethical, non-rhetorical discourse: “Across the gold that buys him or the steel that kills him the Other is not approached face to face; even though they traverse the interval of a transcendence commerce aims at the anonymous market, war is waged against a mass” (TI 228-229). This understanding of the impersonality of commercial exchange can be traced directly to one of the most famous theorizations of the marketplace, and to its perhaps most acknowledged theorist; Marx, several times in Capital, alludes to the destruction, in the circulation of commodities, of “personal barriers imposed by the direct exchange of products” (209):
Here the persons exist for one another merely as representatives [Repräsentanten11] and hence owners, of commodities. As we proceed to develop our investigation, we shall find, in general, that the characters who appear on the economic stage [die ökonomischen Charaktermasken der Personen] are merely personifications of economic relations; it is as the bearers of these economic relations that they come into contact with each other. (179 / 51)
Furthermore, commercial relations, in their symmetry and economy as closed systems of quid pro quo exchange, fall far short of Levinas’s formulation of the truly ethical relation properly realized. From one of his interviews with Philippe Nemo:
Ph.N.: But is not the Other also responsible in my regard? E.L.: Perhaps, but that is his affair. One of the fundamental themes of Totality and Infinity about which we have not yet spoken is that the intersubjective relation is a non-symmetrical relation. In this sense, I am responsible for the Other without waiting for reciprocity, were I to die for it [dût-il m’en coûter la vie]. (EI 98)
Readers and reviewers of Levinas have not remained silent on the perceived “Christianity” of this Jewish thinker’s openly giving, non-reciprocal relationships which must be maintained, even were it to cost one one’s life, as the original phrases it. Such readings have been abetted by Levinas’s notion of “subjectivity as such” as “initially hostage; it answers to the point of expiating for others” (EI 100).12 The Levinasian call for justice can never be a call for justice for oneself, but only for other others who are in need of protection from another. The inter-subjective relation as prescribed by Levinas, though, is clearly not one that can in any way be categorized as investment; there is no economics of ethical discourse, no Odyssean return from the other that one can or should expect. The idea is to give without receiving, and to keep giving without receiving, even unto death, the point at which one can give no more. Derrida has framed this concept with explicit recourse to the language of the market (and of the church) in his most sustained engagement with ethics, The Gift of Death, when he writes that “absolute duty (towards God and in the singularity of faith) implies a sort of gift or sacrifice that functions beyond both debt and duty, beyond duty as a form of debt” (63). The subjects in Shakespeare’s Venice become immediately subjects in deep interpersonal trouble, for the obsession with investment return and with debt lurks in every aspect of Venetian relationships.
Much has been written on the manner in which The Merchant of Venice appears to corroborate claims made by Lévi-Strauss in his Elementary Structures of Kinship, and on the use of women as items of exchange that reify relationships between the men of Venice, within the context of Elizabethan norms for marriage. Karen Newman has more broadly elaborated on “the exchange between the erotic and the economic that characterizes the play’s representation of human relations,” but there are a couple of textual moments that have thus far escaped examination in the context of gifts, given in love, as pure investments (123).13 These moments also declaim passionately against the Levinasian notion of the subject that gives and expects no return for his or her gift. It is already made clear early in the play that Bassanio’s suit for Portia is at least as fiscally as amorously motivated, and the suitor concretizes his demand for return on his (Antonio’s) investment when he tells Portia, “I come by note to give, and to receive” (MV 3.2.140). Not to be outdone, Portia returns the favor thirty lines later with the giving of her ring as bond; the ring, she declares, stands for all she has, including her servants and house, and she
give[s] them with this ring,
Which when you part from, lose, or give away,
Let it presage the ruin of your love,
And be my vantage to exclaim on you. (MV 3.2.171-174)
Portia’s “gift” is a clear investment into a power stake in the future of her relations with Bassanio, a loan which, if defaulted on, will give her cause and moral authority to assume control of the marriage and “exclaim” on her husband (one can hardly ignore the palpable, metrically weighted presence of the word “claim” in the phrase). Portia’s investiture works wonders; although it is Gratiano who speaks the final timorous words, one can just as easily hear them as from the mouth of Bassanio: “Well, while I live, I’ll fear no other thing / So sore, as keeping safe Nerissa’s [or perhaps Portia’s] ring” (MV 5.1.306-307). The romantic relationship that takes center stage in Venice is managed not by giving subjects, but by subjects anticipating circulative return. This is amply expressed in strikingly Levinasian terms when Bassanio says to his love, “I swear to thee, even by thine own fair eyes / Wherein I see myself—” (MV 5.1.242-243). He is immediately interrupted by Portia, but the truth is out—the other in Shakespeare’s Venice (even the significant other) is at best a mirror that returns the own invested gaze of the same to its origin, to its home, back on its narcissistic self. The Lévi-Straussian framework, positing the gift as a ploy for social status within the community, works well, but can just as adequately (and perhaps more properly) be labeled investment in order to ground its position in the market.
Even the homosocial space in The Merchant of Venice is tainted by the ubiquity of investment thinking. In the Karen Newman essay that I have already drawn from, Newman points out that feminist critics have often had trouble with the homosocial bond between Antonio and Bassanio, and have shared concerns that such a (male) space is posited by the play as a safe haven from the circulation and vocabulary of capital that ravages the other relations in Venice and Belmont. Newman herself, again with recourse to Lévi-Strauss, holds that, “In giving more than can be reciprocated, Portia short-circuits the system of exchange and the male bonds it creates, winning her husband away from the arms of Antonio” (125). Newman’s language here might place too much confidence in the bond itself between Antonio and Bassanio, though.
Clearly, throughout the play, Antonio clings desperately to a notion of the homosocial space as a locus of pure giving, freed from discussion of duty and debt, but this utopia is dissolved by the play’s conclusion. At the outset, Bassanio admits, “To you Antonio / I owe the most in money and in love” (MV 1.1.130-131), and Antonio is incensed and offended:
You know me well, and herein spend but time
To wind about my love with circumstance,
And out of doubt you do me now more wrong
In making question of my uttermost
Than if you had made waste of all I have. (MV 1.1.153-157)
Antonio evidently intends to give, despite no return from Bassanio for gifts already given; he later, in conversation with Shylock, explicitly opposes the spaces of friendship and business:
If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not
As to thy friends, for when did friendship take
A breed for barren metal of his friend? (MV 1.3.130-132)
This passage is usually read as a critique of usury and thus of Shylock’s business practices, but it is no less a defense of the homosocial space as outside of business and the swirling circulation of capital. Finally, though, in his hour of need, Antonio dismantles the haven of the homosocial, and introduces into it the language of the marketplace when he writes, in a letter to Bassanio, “all debts are clear’d between you and I, if I might but see you at my death” (MV 3.2.317-318). The other-directed free giving of the structure of male friendship in The Merchant of Venice is, it seems, yet another casualty of capital relations.
There are two more areas that I want to examine in light of their complication by the market politics of The Merchant of Venice, and they are both handy dichotomies passed down by centuries of work on the play: justice versus mercy, and Jew versus Christian. I would like to treat these two sets together because I think that they are intimately related to each other by the play, more so than everything else I have looked at is related by the terms of capital that have invaded it. The relation between the justice/mercy binary and the Jew/Christian one is captured nicely in Marion Perret’s passing reference to the play of “Old Law/New Law” problems in Venice; the Old Law clearly points to the Jewish, justice-oriented ethics of the Old Testament, while the New Law gestures toward the Christian, mercy-extending ethics of the New Testament, the Biblical appendage that scripturally separates Christian from Jew (Perret 264).
In the interest of reintroducing and complicating attention to the conflict between Odyssean and Exodus thought above, this difference is also one of linguistic and cultural tradition, the Hebraism of the Old Testament as against the Greekness of the New Testament. The complication is this: Whereas outward-bound subjectivity and Exodus thinking becomes, in Levinas and Walzer, synonymous with other-directed (and even merciful) endeavor, and whereas homeward-bound and same-directed Odyssean thinking becomes for Levinas, Horkheimer, and Adorno the very antithesis of ethical thought, the Old Law/New Law dichotomy clearly reverses the polarities. The Jews (of the Exodus heritage) become the obsessors over justice, and the Odyssean Greeks (now New Testament Christians) become the bearers of mercy.
These associations are concretized in The Merchant of Venice, as Shylock is repeatedly implicated, by his own words, in the bloodthirsty quest for justice, for restitution, for a return of offense on the head of the offender. “Tell me not of mercy,” he says famously, “The Duke shall grant me justice” (MV 3.3.1, 3.3.8). The Duke, once the balance of legal power has been shifted by Portia from Shylock to the State, chooses not to grant Shylock justice, of course, but rather to set an example of which all Christendom will be proud: “That thou shalt see the difference of our spirit / I pardon thee thy life before thou ask it” (MV 4.1.366-367). The identification of Christianity with mercy, though, is undoubtedly nullified by Portia’s own hard-handed rendering of letter-of-the-law justice against Shylock, and ethical allegiances become muddled. I cannot help but invoke the Said/Walzer debate again here, where justice and mercy are likewise curiously redistributed14; in the “Exchange” between Said and Walzer from Grand Street, Said waxes positively and self-consciously Christian in his demands on Israel: “Instead of pressing hectoring demands on a people [Palestinians] that Walzer’s favorite state [Israel] and movement [Zionism] have already persecuted mercilessly, he should express compassion and atonement. Yes, compassion and atonement” (Said and Walzer 259). From the other side of the debate, Mark Walhout prescribes an abandonment of justice politics as a strategy for, not the Jews, but the Palestinians: “Perhaps all we can say is that the Palestinians will be making a courageous sacrifice in giving up their claim to strict justice in order to pursue a peace that holds the promise of greater justice in the future” (217). In a debate over Exodus thinking, both sides look to mercy on the part of the other side as a potential solution (if not as the cure-all for the conflict), showing perhaps that the quality of mercy is indeed communal property, even if treated as a hot potato always best in someone else’s hands, or graciously extended by someone else.
At the very least, it is clear that no one owns mercy in The Merchant of Venice, for it, like all else in the play, has collapsed into the market, become dubiously embedded in the realm of investment, the realm of its very impossibility. The Duke first broaches this notion in the play when he asks Shylock, “How shalt thou hope for mercy rend’ring none?” (MV 4.1.88). The Duke’s question perfectly frames mercy within an Odyssean model of return on what is sent out; Shylock is being persuaded (ineffectively, as it happens) that forgiveness is a good investment, and that one gets no return on the capital of mercy without first putting it into circulation. Portia attempts to rescue mercy from the market in her often quoted (and often out of context) expounding on its qualities, a speech certainly worth another look:
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest,
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes,
’Tis mightiest in the mightiest, it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown.
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings:
But mercy is above this sceptred sway,
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself. (MV 4.1.182-193)
Mercy is, in Portia’s (Balthazar’s) reading of it, an unequivocal good, one that hurts no one and helps everyone, both the person extending it and the person accepting it. She splits mercy from the play of worldly power and makes it instead property of the Christian God, but cannot help reinserting it later into the economy of investment, where it properly belongs in the play:
We do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer, doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. (MV 4.1.198-200)
Despite the histrionics of the role-playing young judge, Shakespeare’s text ultimately returns mercy to the quid pro quo economy of the marketplace, where one is taught to offer something only because one prays for it oneself.
The New Law of mercy portrayed in The Merchant of Venice is alleged to supplant the Old Law, the Old Testament predilection for justice (as expounded during the Israelites’ desert years, in Leviticus), but the play itself, ushered along by its characters, troubles such a conception of human ethical and moral progression. It is here that alterity meets the market, that Shylock’s Jewishness confronts the Hellenic, Odyssean narrative of capitalist return and poses profound questions. “The Jews were not the sole owners of the circulation sector,” write Horkheimer and Adorno, “but they had been active in it for so long that they mirrored in their own ways the hatred they had always borne” (174). Stephen Greenblatt offers instead the contrary statement that “if Shakespeare subtly suggests obscure links between Gentile and Jew, he compels the audience to transform its disturbing perception of sameness into a reassuring perception of difference”—contrary to Horkheimer and Adorno in that Greenblatt does not acknowledge the extent to which Jews and Christians of The Merchant of Venice are in fact made similar by the market politics that transform everyone involved into a pure other-denying investor (“Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism” 43). Greenblatt does repeat in slightly different terms, though, the claim of Horkheimer and Adorno that the Jew has come to mirror his or her other, the Christian cultural same: “It is important to grasp the great extent to which the Jew is brought into being by the Christian society around him” (47). Shylock himself makes the same argument—essentially, that it is the fault of Christian society itself that the Jew is as he is, that Christianity has created its own other in its own image—following the “Hath not a Jew?” speech:
Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?—if you prick us do we not bleed? if you tickle us do we not laugh? if you poison us do we not die? and if you wrong us shall we not revenge?—if we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? revenge! If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?—why revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. (MV 3.1.61-67)
Shylock is interrogating Elizabethan England’s very conception of Jewishness, tethering it in principle to Christianity itself. He also crucially adds the notion of revenge to the realm of economic circulation in the play. And if he makes his defensive claim to humanity by appeal to the power to possess capital—“Hath a dog money? is it possible / A cur can lend three thousand ducats?” (MV 2.1.110-120)—he does so because it is the only defense that the Christian merchant might understand. Shylock calls into question his own otherness by obliterating the conceptual space between the dominant Christian culture and the liminal Jewish culture, which have become so like each other that Portia, dressed as Balthazar, must recalibrate her own notions of alterity, must demand, when she enters the scene of Antonio’s judgment, “Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?” (MV 4.1.172).15
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Admitting that “None of us likes to think that our Shakespeare, Shakespeare of the comprehensive humanity, could be prejudiced,” Perret has argued that “What keeps The Merchant of Venice onstage today seems to be less its greatness than the challenge of presenting it in ways that diminish what can be perceived as bias in the text” (265-266). I have returned to this play here partially in order to salvage it for myself, much as my turning The Merchant toward Levinas’s thought belies an effort to rescue the latter from what some see as an ether of abstraction. Derrida has certainly raised such accusations; Levinas is a vociferous critic of the ontological abstractions of Heideggerean Dasein, a general, fundamental category in which all individual existents become lost, or at least unaccounted for, but the highly conceptualized Levinasian other (autre or autrui) hardly seems more concrete to Derrida. He makes clear this position in “Violence and Metaphysics”: “Despite all appearances, there is no concept of the Other,” “Nor is autrui a proper noun, even though its anonymity signifies but the unnamable source [ressource] of every proper noun” (104, 105). Having himself often borne criticism for a tendency to abstraction, Derrida defends himself thus: “I will simply add that it is not necessary to point to a flesh-and-blood example, or to write moralizing pamphlets … in order to speak an ethical-political language or … to reproduce in a discourse said to be theoretical the founding categories of all ethical-political statements” (Limited Inc 96-97). Derrida, however, is not constrained in this context, as is Levinas, by a self-determined agenda that explicitly scripts itself as against abstraction and over-theorization—whence comes one’s occasional unease with the latter. Luce Irigaray’s essay on Levinas, “The Fecundity of the Caress,” is noteworthy partially because it usefully tethers a putatively theoretical ethics to a corporeality that is at best muffled in Totality and Infinity.16 Whereas Irigaray saves Levinas from abstraction by luring him back into the body, this analysis of The Merchant of Venice has hoped to coax his thought into the marketplace.
Greenblatt has spoken of Shakespeare’s works as “sites of institutional and ideological contestation” (Shakespearean Negotiations 3). This doubtless holds true for a great many of his plays, but certainly any ideological contestation in The Merchant of Venice is rendered moot before the theatre is even underway, undercut by the overriding and domineering (and same-making) epistemology of return. In the context of the thought of Levinas, Walzer, and Horkheimer and Adorno, it is clear that much of the epistemological duel between the narratives of outbound Exodus and of home-fixated Odyssey is ended before the opponents can even confront each other. The open market with its closed Odyssean circulatory obsession in The Merchant of Venice is nothing if not a great ethical leveler, reducing both Christians and Jews to the same baseness. The strength of bloodthirsty justice and the paucity of bloodless mercy can be directly related to the fact that even mercy has become implicated in the same economy of returns as justice, drawing its water from the same tainted source. Where justice seeks the circling of the offense back around to the offender, mercy must open to the other, in the very ways that Levinas has articulated (what David Steiner has called an “ethical interruption of reciprocity”). Mercy expects no return; it is not an investment but a freely given gift, one departing from the subject in the manner of Exodus, with no thought of a homeward leg to the journey—an impossibility in the moral world of Shakespeare’s Venice. Where the governing episte-mological model is the cyclical investment and return of the Homeric Odyssey, thoughts turn back to the subject, to the same. In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare exposes a cosmos of self-interest in which any overture made toward the other, any acknowledgement of Exodus-thinking in the vein of the metaphysical tradition to which Levinas’s thought aspires, is always already trampled under the Odyssean mode upon whose foundations the market of Venice is built: teleocentric, with others as roadside impediments; and yet simultaneously archécentric, where the telos is also the arché, and where others remain outside this point of origin and of the same. Shakespeare and Levinas thus unearth, in the logical and conceptual heritage of mercantile Venice, a stake in the birth of capitalism and the death of ethics.
Notes
Reprinted courtesy of The Upstart Crow (Clemson University Press). Originally appeared as “Other Capital: Investment, Return, Alterity and The Merchant of Venice,” vol. 22, 2002, pp. 21–36.
1 I would like to thank M. Josephine Diamond for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and Richard Duerden for first introducing me to the thought of Levinas and Derrida.
2 To those familiar with literary applications of Levinas’s writings, my approach will appear somewhat “back-door.” A fairly straightforward use of Levinasian ethics would isolate ethical (interpersonal) relations within a text and proceed from there, as does my “The Predication of Violence, the Violence of Predication: Reconstructing Hiroshima with Duras and Resnais” (Dialectical Anthropology 24 [1999], 387-406). The project here will, against this, take bits of Totality and Infinity that have been ignored as mere operational metaphors or exhausted tropes (Odyssey/ circulation, Exodus/departure) and raise them to the status of central motif.
3 Kiernan Ryan, Shakespeare, 2nd. ed (Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995).
4 Where I have supplemented translations in brackets, from original editions cited at the end of the paper, I have done so in the interest of either restoring untranslatable valences or maintaining fidelity to the original.
5 Derrida revisits this, at Richard Kearney’s prodding, in Kearney’s States of Mind: Dialogues With Contemporary Thinkers (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 156-176. See especially 157-158.
6 Here, Boyarin appears to conflate the Emerald Isle, Ireland, with a larger of the British Isles, the island of England, Wales and Scotland, something which Howe does not do. An earlier version of Boyarin’s chapter can be found as “Reading Exodus into History,” New Literary History 23 (1992), 523-554.
7 Walzer’s larger assertion is that the Old Testament Exodus story has furnished a useful and often positively-valued narrative framework for revolutionary politics, one that is still in use today (in, for example, liberation theology in Latin America) and that figured importantly in the Civil Rights and Anti-Apartheid movements in the United States and South Africa, respectively. A vitriolic debate erupted between Walzer and Edward Said, whose review, “Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution: A Canaanite Reading,” points out that the promised land was not vacant when the Israelites arrived and that a divinely sanctioned genocide ensued. Said blames the prevalence of such “Exodus politics” (Walzer’s term) for the difficulties accompanying “the Jewish presence in Palestine” (Said 98).
8 And, ultimately, evolves into the sort of dangerous “affirmative culture” that provides the fertile soil for political formations such as National Socialism. See Jay 263-265.
9 It is tempting to see in this nostalgia for passé fictions of romance and chivalry an anticipation of what Max Weber will later call Entzauberung and refer to as rationalization and disenchantment.
10 David Steiner amplifies this point persuasively.
11 Remarkable here is Marx’s assertion, in almost Levinasian terms, that the interpersonal relationship, when relocated to the sphere of commercial circulation, is degraded to one in which the subjects merely represent, rather than “express themselves,” as required by Levinas’s depiction of the ethical relation in Totality and Infinity (51). Note also Marx’s use of the vocabulary of the theatre, stage.
12 See also Otherwise than Being: “Here the Same, in its bearing as Same, is more and more extended with regard to the other, extended up to substitution as hostage, in an expiation” (146).
13 Critics have often noted reciprocity or mutuality in Shakespeare’s comedies, usually with recourse to kinship rather than capital: for example, Camille Slights’ “The Principle of Recompense in ‘Twelfth Night,’” Modern Language Review 77 (3), 537-546; and Marianne L. Novy’s “‘And You Smile Not, He’s Gagged’: Mutuality in Shakespearean Comedy,” PQ 55 (1976), 178-194. Contrast these with Sitta Von Reden’s description of symbolic investment and return in Menander—a foundational figure, of course, in European comedy—in “The Commodification of Symbols: Reciprocity and its Perversions in Menander,” in Christopher Gill, Norman Postlethwaite and Richard Seaford eds., Reciprocity in Ancient Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 255-278.
14 Of course, the context here is quite different, no longer an issue of Christianity versus Judaism, but of Zionism versus Palestinian liberation, a shift that only further dramatizes both sides’ recourse to mercy politics.
15 James Shapiro has also discussed the slippery notion of Jewishness in Shakespeare’s England. One of the most interesting revelations of his Shakespeare and the Jews, one which sheds light on several passages of The Merchant of Venice, relates “how Jews after the Expulsion from England had migrated to Scotland, which was thought to explain why Scots were so cheap and hated pork” (2). The results of this Exodus of England’s Jews are detailed by Shapiro in his chapter on “False Jews and Counterfeit Christians,” but I would turn the quick equation of Jews and Scots immediately back to the Merchant of Venice, where it further muddles the play’s notion of otherness. Solanio first brings Scots into the play in the opening scene, when he refers in passing to laughing at bagpipers (1.1.53). Portia speaks of a Scottish suitor who scuffled with an English one, setting the tone of dangerous Celticness, but, most significantly, it is Shylock who mentions bagpipes twice in one speech during the climactic fourth act, and in a manner that recalls Shapiro’s phrases on pork-hating Scots: Some men there are love not a gaping pig! / Some that are mad if they behold a cat! / And others when the bagpipe sings i’th’ nose, / Cannot contain their urine. (4.1.47-50) Shapiro’s chapter points out that Elizabethan England also saw affinities between the Jews and the Irish (Shakespeare 42). Clearly, several cultural others were elided in a medley of fear and ignorance, but with money always an issue, for the perceived cheapness of the Jews and the Scots appears to have been, as Shapiro insinuates, the strongest evidence in support of the conflation.
16 “The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity section IV, B, ‘The Phenomenology of Eros,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 231-256. See also Irigaray’s “Questions à Emmanuel Lévinas” (Critique 46, November 1990, 911-920) and the chapter on Levinas in Tina Chanter’s Ethics of Eros: Irigiaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York: Routledge, 1995).