There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face.
—Shakespeare (M 1.4.11-12)
The future belongs to ghosts.
—Derrida, Specters of Marx1
While it is common to cite Shakespeare in the same sentence as one that explains or refers to Levinas’s ethical project, only occasionally do we see this mention made with regard to the ghosts that populate Shakespeare’s plays. The most common, and indeed most famous, of the references to Shakespeare by Levinas can be found in his 1946/7 lecture course published as Time and the Other. With its references to Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Hamlet, and its discussions of death and eros, one might call this course an ethico-philosophical meditation on Shakespeare’s tragedies. Yet what binds these plays together within Levinas’s discussion is the role specifically of suicide within each play. Over fifteen years after publishing this lecture course, Levinas writes at the end of his 1963 essay, “The Trace of the Other,”
a face is of itself a visitation and transcendence. But a face, wholly open, can at the same time be in itself because it is the trace of illeity. Illeity is the origin of the alterity of being in which the in itself of objectivity participates while also betraying it.2
Here Levinas forges both explicit and implicit connections among several of his central themes: the trace, the face, alterity, the ethical—and through his reference to a “visitation,” he connects these themes to the ghost. This essay will examine the relationship between the face and the trace, using the ghostly apparition, especially in Macbeth, as a way to connect these tropes in Levinas’s work. If it is the case that the ghost is like a trace, the ghost then also functions as a sign of the ethical; indeed, the ghost may very well appear in Shakespeare’s plays as a trace of ethical obligation.
* * *
Through Shakespeare’s Scottish tragedy Macbeth runs an almost constant undercurrent of discourse about speaking, being spoken to, and demanding to be recognized. In Levinasian terms, the whole episode of the Porter may be read as an allegory of the Other’s demand for recognition. The keeper of Macbeth’s castle, he self-consciously plays at being the keeper of Hell’s gate; but other, more postmodern interpretations are possible. The stage directions call for a knocking sound audible to the audience, followed by this speech:
PORTER: Here’s a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key. [Knocking.] Knock, knock, knock. Who’s there, i’ the name of Beelzebub? Here’s a farmer that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty: come in time; have napkins enow about you; here you’ll sweat for’t. [Knocking.] Knock, knock! Who’s there, i’ the other devil’s name? Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come in, equivocator. [Knocking.] Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there? Faith, here’s an English tailor come hither, for stealing out of a French hose: come in, tailor, here you may roast your goose.—[Knocking.] Knock, knock: never at quiet! What are you?—But this place is too cold for hell. I’ll devil-porter it no further: I had thought to have let in some of all professions, that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire. [Knocking.] Anon, anon! I pray you, remember the porter. (2.3.1-20)
His parting words serve as a textual marker of what will be this scene’s importance later on.
At last, he opens the gate; but not until after having thematized the scenario of an Other knocking (a demand for recognition), insisting once more (refusing to be ignored), and finally gaining entrance. The Witches employ this linguistic register as well, when the second Witch chants: “Open, locks, whoever knocks!” (4.1.63). Finally, Lady Macbeth engages in this same discourse as part of her delirium when she walks and talks in her sleep: “To bed, to bed; there’s knocking at the gate: come, come, come, come, give me your hand: what’s done cannot be undone: to bed, to bed, to bed” (5.1.56-58). Her guilty refusal to respond to the knocking she hears is emblematic of her larger refusal to acknowledge ethical claims placed upon her by the call of the Other.3
If we listen carefully, the multiple knocking scenes in the play are only the most obvious or extreme examples within an overall context of metalanguage, or speeches about speaking. Thus we have Macduff to Ross: “Be not a niggard of your speech” (4.3.181); Ross to Macduff: “Let not your ears despise my tongue for ever” (4.3.201); Macbeth to the Messenger: “Thou com’st to use thy tongue; thy story quickly” (5.5.27); and Macduff to Malcolm at the end of the play: “I see thee compass’d with thy kingdom’s pearl / That speak my salutation in their minds” (5.11.21-22). This last quotation is particularly apt because it establishes the possibility of imagined (as opposed to literal) speech. These examples only multiply when we extend the scenario of speaking / eliciting speech / demanding to be recognized to the many supernatural beings in the play. Macbeth addresses Banquo’s Ghost at the banquet: “If thou canst nod, speak too” (3.4.69). When Macbeth goes to see the Weird Sisters in order to seek their counsel, he starts out: “I conjure you, by that which you profess, / Howe’er you come to know it,—answer me” (4.1.66-67). A few lines later he repeats, “answer me / To what I ask you” (4.1.76-77). The Witches respond in the same register:
| 1 WITCH: | Speak. |
| 2 WITCH: | Demand. |
| 3 WITCH: | We’ll answer. |
| 1 WITCH: | Say, if thou’dst rather hear it from our mouths, Or from our masters? |
| MACBETH: | Call ‘em, let me see ‘em. (4.1.77-79) |
Two ghostly faces appear in response, an armed head (this phantasmal knight’s helmet hides his face)4 and a child wearing a crown. The First Witch instructs Macbeth regarding the first apparition:
| MACBETH: | Tell me, thou unknown power,— |
| 1 WITCH: | He knows thy thought: |
| Hear his speech, but say thou naught. (4.1.85-86) |
Macbeth begs for “one word more” but the First Witch declares of the apparition, “He will not be commanded” (4.1.91). The Witches all instruct Macbeth not to speak to the child wearing a crown: “Listen, but speak not to ‘t” (4.1.105). Finally eight kings’ heads parade before him in the air. Their faces resemble one another, as Macbeth notes: “Thou other gold-bound brow, is like the first:—/ A third is like the former” (4.1.130-131). What are we to make of this multiplication of identical faces? Macbeth sees in them a proliferation of the shades of Banquo: “Thou art like the spirit of Banquo; down! / Thy crown does sear mine eyeballs” (4.1.128-129). These ghostly apparitions do not even need to speak in order to produce their desired effect upon Macbeth’s conscience. This guilty empathy is thematized by a peripheral character named Ross who nonetheless voices one of the play’s central ethical messages, namely: “No mind that’s honest / But in it shares some woe” (4.3.198-99). Macbeth’s guilt, in turn, registers upon his own face, as Lady Macbeth does not fail to notice: “Your face, my thane, is as a book where men / May read strange matters” (1.5.60-61).
Although degenerate, Macbeth is presented as higher on the moral scale in this play than his wife, who has lost all capacity for empathy. Indeed, her moral numbness or insensibility appears within the text as the direct result of her invocation to demonic spirits, whom she asks to “[s]top up the access and passage to remorse” (1.5.42). Here she seeks to sever the ethical bond by which the Other could make claims upon her. She affirms later, “Things without all remedy / Should be without regard; what’s done is done” (3.2.13-14). No remorse for her! In fact, she embodies the diametrically opposite response to the call of the Other in a hypothetical scenario where she fantasizes to Macbeth that, rather than desist from the purpose of killing Duncan so her husband can be king, she would rather dash out the brains of her own newborn child:
How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this. (1.7.55-59)
So far from recognizing an ethical obligation to the Other, she lashes out instead, bent on nothing less than total annihilation. This is the ethical foil that shows what our response to the Other should not be.
* * *
In the second lecture of Time and the Other (1946/7), Levinas introduces us to the There is, or il y a. The discussion takes place within a larger discussion about death and solitude. More specifically, he is concerned about the possibility of having power over death—the power to die, to control when one dies. His brief comments about Juliet focus on this theme. Levinas suggests that Juliet’s cry, “I keep the power to die,” expresses what might be true of all tragedies: “This mastery, this possibility of finding a meaning for existence through the possibility of suicide is a constant fact of tragedy … Her cry is a triumph over fatality” (TO 50).5 Yet for Levinas, Hamlet is beyond tragedy. Hamlet’s utterance of his famous phrase, “To be or not to be,” is precisely to recognize what it might mean not to exist, that not to exist is in fact not a mastery. It is to lose mastery. In recognizing that one in fact does not have this mastery, Hamlet realizes he is obligated to be, and this constitutes the absurdity of being: “Being is evil not because it is finite, but because it is without limits” (TO 51).6
As Andrew Cutrofello observes in his book All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity, the insight that Levinas sees in Hamlet’s phrase is what makes Shakespeare so significant for Levinas.7 Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” differentiates him from other tragic figures we see throughout Shakespeare’s plays, many of whom commit suicide as a triumph over their perceived destiny, i.e. their fate. This view holds that suicide is actually a triumph over fatality since one chooses one’s death rather than simply succumbing to it. Levinas, however, sees Shakespeare as moving “‘beyond tragedy or the tragedy of tragedy’ when he has Hamlet discover in the To be or not to be soliloquy that annihilation may be impossible.”8 Here we find an important counter to Heidegger’s famous representation of death as “the possibility of impossibility.”9 Levinas reverses this phrase: death is the impossibility of possibility. Self-annihilation for Levinas is impossible. As he writes in On Escape, originally published in French in 1935, the experiences we use as our attempts to escape from ourselves, (e.g.), pleasure, shame, and nausea, only confirm that we are bound [rivé] to ourselves.10 In contrast to Sartre’s analysis of nausea, which Levinas’s discussion anticipates, it is not nothingness that we seek to escape but instead the fact of our existence.11 Time and the Other restates this earlier position. Death is not an act of freedom, an expression of freedom; rather, death is where all possibilities end. “Death,” Levinas writes, “is in this sense the limit of idealism … Death marks the end” (TO 70-72). He astutely reads death not as a mastery but as a lack of mastery—my virility, my power is gone.
Cutrofello’s reading successfully counters the one offered by Jeffrey Berman in his book Empathic Teaching: Education for Life.12 Berman states that “To be or not to be” is not the question for Levinas. Rather the question is the “right to be.”13 This view emerges in response to the conatus essendi which dominates modernity and makes ethical response to the Other appear as a mythology. Yet Cutrofello’s discussion demonstrates that “To be or not to be” reveals the limits of virility in the face of death.
Levinas’s discussion of death returns him to Shakespeare, as he muses that all of philosophy “is only a meditation on Shakespeare,” an interesting revision of all philosophy being a footnote to Plato. Yet he ties this discussion of death and mastery explicitly to Macbeth’s death (TO 72-73). Avenging the deaths of his family, Macduff tells Macbeth that if anyone other than he, Macduff, kills Macbeth then the ghosts of his family will haunt him forever. Macbeth tells Macduff that he is not scared, for he is not afraid of anyone born of a woman. A slight technicality in Macduff’s entering the world (i.e., a Caesarian section) allows him to declare that he is not of woman born. Hearing this, Macbeth now fears his death, but defeat is not yet; and Macbeth seizes one last battle with hope to live in spite of the destiny he was foretold:
Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane,
And thou oppos’d, being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last. Before my body
I throw my warlike shield: lay on, Macduff;
And damn’d be him that first cries, Hold, enough!
(5.10.30-34)
In Levinas’s view, “death is thus never assumed, it comes” (TO 73). The hero glimpses another chance. The hero wants to live. And so Levinas declares, “suicide is contradictory” (TO 73). The presence of hope—the hope that one will live—contradicts the view that we have mastery over death. Hope appears precisely at the moment when death arises. Adding to his discussion of Macbeth, Levinas refers to Hamlet’s speech, which for Levinas is not framed as a right to be for Hamlet. Rather, the question is whether Hamlet should exist or not exist. Should Hamlet take his own life? And more significantly, can he? Of course, on the one hand, he can—he can certainly commit suicide. But Levinas’s own gloss on the phrase indicates that there is something more to existence that supersedes mere life and death. He suggests that Hamlet is a “lengthy testimony to the impossibility of assuming death. Nothingness is impossible … ‘To be or not to be’ is a sudden awareness of this impossibility of annihilating oneself” (TO 73, emphasis ours). We would argue that ghosts appear in Shakespeare as a testament to this impossibility of nothingness.
In the section immediately following his discussion of death, Levinas tells us that we can infer from this analysis that death becomes the limit of virility. It is at this moment of losing mastery that we find ourselves in relationship with something that is absolutely Other, “something bearing alterity, not as provisional determination we can assimilate through enjoyment, but as something whose very existence is made of alterity” (TO 74). In a striking comment intended to contradict the whole of Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time, Levinas asserts, “my solitude is thus not confirmed by death but broken by it” (TO 74). In a short set of steps Levinas then moves from death as the absolute Other, to the feminine, to God. In the end, as we know from the development of his ethical project, the absolute Other is the alterity of the other person who claims me. Only a being who contracts through suffering—that is, whose finitude puts it in a different relationship to death and to life—can be in this kind of relationship with the Other. Fleshing out the rest of the argument, for Levinas, this relationship with the Other is the relationship with the future (TO 77). Although twenty years will separate these writings, Levinas’s language here eventually turns to the language of the trace. The trace of the other connects to the trace of God, bringing his thought full circle back to Time and Other, where the absolutely Other is identified as God.
* * *
Returning now for a moment to Macbeth, another distinct discourse that runs throughout the play is an ongoing conversation about faces and their ability or lack of ability to express accurately the emotions or identities of their wearers. Lady Macduff asks, “What are these faces?” (4.2.79), while Macduff demands to Macbeth, “Tyrant, show thy face!” (5.8.1). Lady Macbeth likewise asks her husband in reproach, “Why do you make such faces?” (3.4.66). Not yet so morally numb as she, he is unable to dissimulate to her satisfaction.
Fear in particular is shown to be an emotion reflected on the face, specifically by a lack of color. The following dialogue between Macbeth and one of his servants likens men’s white faces to those of geese when the blood drains from them out of sheer fright:
| MACBETH: | The devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac’d loon! Where gott’st thou that goose look? |
| SERVANT: | There is ten thousand— |
| MACBETH: | Geese, villain? |
| SERVANT: | Soldiers, sir. |
| MACBETH: | Go, prick thy face, and over-red thy fear, Thou lily-liver’d boy. What soldiers, patch? Death of thy soul! those linen cheeks of thine Are counsellors to fear. What soldiers, whey-face? |
| SERVANT: | The English force, so please you. |
| MACBETH: | Take thy face hence. (5.3.15-19) |
Here Macbeth prefers red faces to white ones; but as it turns out, red faces too abound in this play. Lady Macbeth announces her intention to smear Duncan’s blood on the faces of his grooms: “I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal, / For it must seem their guilt” (2.2.53-54). Later Lennox confirms, “Their hands and faces were all badg’d with blood” (2.3.99). Similarly, Macbeth says to a murderer he hired to kill Banquo: “There’s blood upon thy face” (3.4.11). In case we missed it the first time, Macduff employs the same discourse to describe the outward signs of inner conflict. He cries to all of Scotland, as if a nation too could have a face: “wear thou thy wrongs” (4.3.34).
In these passages we see that the face should register a response to the Other; when it does not, Shakespeare signals to us that something has gone badly awry. This is the case with Lady Macbeth, who—as we have already noted—has lost the capacity for empathy to the extent that she is impervious to ethical demands. Even her murderous husband marvels at her ability to compartmentalize and put on a brave face despite her knowledge of, and complicity in, his own heinous crimes. He marvels at her healthy glow:
You make me strange
Even to the disposition that I owe,
When now I think you can behold such sights,
And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks,
When mine are blanch’d with fear. (1.5.62-64)
And yet hers is but one of many false faces we see parading through a play imbued with metadiscourse about performativity as well as specific props and costume pieces, such as masks, which of course deliberately hide the face. Macbeth invokes this imagery explicitly in his confession of “Masking the business from the common eye / For sundry weighty reasons” (3.1.126-127). As we saw before in the apparition of the ghostly knight whose armor hides his face, a vizier, or vizard in Shakespeare’s English, accomplishes the same purpose as a mask, which is disguise. Macbeth commands, “make our faces vizards to our hearts, / Disguising what they are” (3.2.35-36). The ever-slippery Lady Macbeth advocates an even more elaborate policy of deliberate deceit:
Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye,
Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower,
But be the serpent under’t. (1.5.62-64)
Malcolm notices the proliferation of false faces and sums up the situation with the rueful comment, “all things foul would wear the brows of grace” (4.3.24). Actually, though, false faces are presented in this play as in some sense genuine or authentic in that they reflect accurately the deceit that lies within the heart, as in “False face must hide what the false heart doth know” (1.7.82).
A very special case is posed by the faces of ghosts and sleepwalkers, whose faces resemble death (which in turn resembles sleep). These zombie-like creatures, the very definition of the undead, are equated in this play through the words of their personification, Lady Macbeth: “[T]he sleeping and the dead / Are but as pictures,” she says (2.2.50-51). But pictures of what? We might for a moment think of three completely white canvases exhibited in 2007 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which were much commented-upon at the time in the blogosphere.14 Apparently, a picture does not have to be filled-in to count as one.… For his part, Macduff once again employs the language of faces to contrast death to sleep at the moment in the second act when he discovers Duncan’s murdered corpse:
Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit,
And look on death itself! up, up, and see
The great doom’s image! Malcolm! Banquo!
As from your graves rise up, and walk like sprites
To countenance this horror! (2.3.73-77)
The verb “countenance” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary in its first definition as “to assume a particular demeanour, behaviour, or aspect”—in other words, let empathy do its work, and allow one’s face to be changed by an encounter with the radically Other. In fact, the OED lists a now-obsolete definition of this verb, which is more often used as a noun, and gives as an example these exact lines from this play: “to keep in countenance (by acting in the same way); to be in keeping with.”15 What better definition of the ethically desirable response to the Other’s call, as described by Levinas, than to “keep in countenance” or “be in keeping with” that Other’s needs? In fact, the ghost and the sleepwalker seem to share an idealized space, a sort of limbo, where their faces become a blank slate. They are morally dead, numb and unable to register a response to the call of the Other. A gentlewoman in the play describes this physical aspect of Lady Macbeth, who enters the stage sleepwalking and with a blank face: “This is her very guise; and, upon my life, fast asleep” (5.1.16-17). The doctor confirms, “You see, her eyes are open”; to which the gentlewoman responds: “Ay, but their sense is shut” (5.1.21-22). This tabula rasa is presented within the text as impervious to the Other’s demands.
That is, however, only when the face is in passive or receiving mode—when the face is not on the attack. As classical tradition informs us, Gorgons were mythological figures, three sisters who had snakes for hair and possessed the power to turn anyone who looked at them into stone. The most famous of the three was known as Medusa, but her sisters Stheno and Euryale were equally deadly. Macduff describes the scene of Duncan’s murdered corpse with specific reference to the Gorgons who could freeze with a glance:
Approach the chamber, and destroy
With a new Gorgon:—do not bid me speak;
See, and then speak yourselves. (2.3.67-69)
Here we see an intersection of the discourse about faces with the first web of discourse we described in this essay, the one about speaking and eliciting speech. Malcolm too alludes to a less empathic rôle for the face in the ominous line, “There’s daggers in men’s smiles” (2.3.136). Finally, the play ends with—what else?—a disembodied head being paraded across the stage, namely Macbeth’s, severed and bloody, as one last face to be forever seared into the minds of the play’s audience. Macduff triumphantly brandishes his sword with one hand while gesturing toward Macbeth’s head, which he has unceremoniously lopped off: “behold, where stands / The usurper’s cursed head” (5.11.20-21). Quite appropriately for this play infused with performative metadiscourse from start to finish, the final scene ends with a dead face that can no longer respond to the Other’s call. Or can it? Perhaps in the unwritten sequel, Macduff will be haunted by Macbeth, just as previously Macbeth had been haunted by Banquo.…
* * *
Utilizing the references to Shakespeare in Levinas’s early works, Megan Craig offers several astute observations on how these tragic figures operate within Levinasian tropes. Her description of the face in particular draws out the “ghostly” nature of it—that it resides between real and ideal, between abstract and lived, between appearance and disappearance. She describes the face in this way:
The face’s “illeity” (BPW 75), its ambiguity, hesitates in an expressive gap between appearance and disappearance, never resolving into something definite, remaining unknowable, un-nameable, and other. It is barely a trace. In its resistance to being knowable generally or particularly, the face is the site of a uniquely transcendent sense, significant without signifying. It signals an empty, open interval of meaning—an abstract, yet human significance prefiguring and grounding the possibility of any definite or concrete signified. Levinas describes this in several ways, in each case dislodging dualities—subject/object, inside/outside, immanent/ transcendent—between which meaning supposedly arches.
Following this description she adds that the phenomenon of the face can be described as “the abstract sense of someone other.”16 As Craig notes, Levinas uses imagery from Macbeth to “conjure up” the il y a not only in Existence and Existents (1947) but also in “Enigma and Phenomenon” (1965).17 Referring to the well-known passage from Existence and Existents, which makes reference to Macbeth, Megan Craig contrasts Levinas’s thoughts here with what he says later in “Enigma and Phenomenon”:
Horror is the event of being which returns in the heart of this negation, as though nothing had happened. “And that,” says Macbeth, “is more strange than crime itself” … Specters, ghosts, sorceresses are not only a tribute Shakespeare pays to his time … they allow him to move constantly toward this limit between being and nothingness where being insinuates itself even in nothingness, like bubbles of the earth (“the Earth hath bubbles”). (EE 57)
In “Enigma and Phenomenon” Levinas writes, “The Saying, that is, the face, is the discretion of an unheard of proposition, an insinuation, immediately reduced to nothing, breaking up like the ‘bubbles of the earth,’ which Banquo speaks of at the beginning of Macbeth” (BPW 74). Here Craig notes that Levinas’s description of both the face and the il y a are remarkably, if not simply eerily, similar.18 That is, the description moves between a sense of someone and a sense of something, not unlike how we might describe a ghost or specter, that feeling of being haunted—by something? Or someone …?
In her interpretation of Levinas’s reading of Macbeth, Craig also notes the different reactions to the witches exhibited by Macbeth versus Banquo. She writes, “Where Levinas observes Macbeth’s sense of horror in 1947, in 1965 he remembers Banquo and correctly attributes to Banquo his line in act I, scene 3.” Here is what we find in Macbeth: “The earth hath bubbles, as water has, / And these [the Witches] are of them: Whither are they vanish’d?” (1.3.77-78). Craig offers the gloss that “Banquo, unlike Macbeth, is not frightened by the Witches, imploring them.” She continues with Banquo’s lines from Macbeth: “Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear / Your favours nor your hate” (1.3.68-69). Finally, Craig observes,
Later Banquo becomes the haunting presence that torments Macbeth, the ghostly apparition who refuses to die a decisive death. Clarifying the attribution of the line in 1965, Levinas emphasizes a different, now positive significance to fluidity and impermanence—envisioning the surplus of infinity as an ever-opening possibility.19
Craig’s reading is fascinating and worth noting, especially in her emphasis not only on the ghostly apparition but also on the Witches—creatures who are both of and at the same time not of this world. Where we part company with Craig is in her claim that Levinas’s turn toward religious or theological language is an unfortunate choice for him.20 Rather, one might argue that it is his only logical move. Religion sits at the in-between—between transcendence and immanence, between real and ideal, between alive and dead. Critics who fail to see this point are only fanning the flames of the religious / secular divide which, according to some, is “threatening to overtake and stunt Levinas scholarship.”21 We would argue instead that this religious language is necessary. It enriches the scholarship and has in fact helped advance it, forging connections among disciplines, helping to clarify terms, and developing a deeper understanding of the limits of philosophical language. The fact that scholars are unwilling to see why Levinas must turn to a linguistic register that sits outside of traditional Western categories of ontology might say more about philosophy as a discipline than about his turn to this language.22
Levinas’s 1963 essay “The Trace of the Other,” which ends with a discussion of Moses and the trace of God, might help us see why this is the case. The idea of the trace has been contentious in contemporary French philosophy. Some scholars attribute its origin to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Yet the dates of their respective writings suggest that Levinas first introduced the term in his May 1963 Louvain lecture. The relationship between Derrida and Levinas is well-known, even if it is not always clear who influenced whom, or how closely their thought was aligned. Many scholars believe that Levinas’s magnum opus, Otherwise than Being, responded to the sustained criticism in “Violence and Metaphysics,” Derrida’s 1964 essay devoted to Totality and Infinity. To address the criticism that Levinas simply did not escape ontological language, Levinas developed a vocabulary which—while effective for addressing Derrida’s critique—also rendered the book nearly impenetrable.
The themes that occupy the essays in Humanism of the Other function as transitional pieces between Totality and Infinity (1961), where he first develops his ethical project, and Otherwise than Being (1974), where he works out the details, avoiding many of the criticisms that haunted his previous attempts. Thus, these essays help us see the transition from the themes of death in Time and the Other, to the Other and ethics in Totality and Infinity, to the trace, which occupies his most mature writing. These essays indicate that Levinas seemed to have anticipated at least some of the criticisms that would later come his way. However, his use of the trace precedes the publication of Derrida’s early criticism, and thus we see how he developed this concept outside of Derrida’s critique. Derrida later appropriates this concept in several of his own writings, invoking the trace to refer to that which is repeatable in everyday experience. For him, like for Levinas, the ghost provides an especially helpful image for his discussion.
In Specters of Marx, Derrida is particularly interested in how the specter is always revenant—on the one hand, by definition a ghost—but (more interesting to Derrida) a ghost which is specifically revenant because it has returned. We cannot control the comings and goings of a ghost, or a haunting; but most importantly, a ghost begins by beginning again, by returning. A ghost is the return of someone who was once there, once alive. Yet the ghost is not fully dead or else the ghost would not have returned to the space of the living. Thus, the ghost sits in the in-between—between living and non-living, real and not real. For Derrida, a ghost is a trace, a trace of the Other. Although ghosts do not always register in people’s minds as religious figures—think children’s television, like Scooby Doo—they are nonetheless associated with ritual magic, spirits, and exorcism.23 Whether pagan or transcendental, the ghost is clearly associated with religious imagery. Thus, we argue that the connection Derrida forges between the trace and the ghost is not coincidental.24
* * *
Levinas’s essay “The Trace of the Other,” published in September 1963, develops the ideas that appear in ‘The Trace,’ the concluding section of his 1963 essay, “Signification and Sense.” This essay brings together ideas from lectures he gave between 1961 and 1963.25 In this work, Levinas refers obliquely to Ernst Cassirer and his philosophy of culture. Specifically, Levinas is interested in cultural meaning and symbols.26 Richard Cohen’s reading of this essay is instructive:
[E]xpression is not absorbed into an ontological dialectic of revelation and concealment, à la Heidegger, but neither is expression sufficiently grasped by greater self-knowledge regarding lateral reference to its broader cultural context and the transcendental conditions of that cultural context, à la Cassirer. Rather, the expression of the other, what Levinas calls the “face” (visage), as originating in the unreachable and nonthematizable transcendence of the other—beyond being and “before culture”—puts the self into question, moral question. The other disturbs, upsets, and overwhelms the self-relation of the self with a moral obligation to respond that cuts deeper—is more important—than cultural formations or the ontological configuration of being … Symbolic forms are interrupted, overcharged, and broken by moral imperatives. Symbols cannot ‘contain’ the moral imperatives that ultimately drive them and give them sense. (HO xx-xxi)
What then do we make of the final section of this essay to which Cohen refers? What relationship does Levinas’s concept of the trace have to his view of that which is before cultural expression, before epistemological condition, the moral imposition of the other—the trauma of obligation and the responsibility to respond? And finally, how do these things connect to the ghost, a concept that in fact haunts Levinas’s writings?
In this discussion of the trace, Levinas refers to the experience of the other as a visitation. The face that solicits us, as he describes it here, is not part of “another world,” a world behind a world as in Kant’s phenomenal and noumenal worlds—the world of experience, and the “real” world that sits behind that. Rather, he says, “The beyond is precisely beyond the ‘world,’ that is beyond all unveiling” (HO 38-39). Again, contra both Kant and Cassirer, the face for Levinas is abstract. It is not the seeing of a face like an empiricist would experience. The abstraction is this visitation, this beginning or advent that disrupts immanence without becoming part of this World. It is, as it were, a third way, reminiscent of the third way for which he searched in his essays of the 1930s. It is a third path that he claims defies the normal contradictions of absent-present. How, he asks, is this third path possible? If we continue along a Kantian path looking for the “real” world that exists beyond (or behind) the world of experience, we will not find this third path. That is, if we follow Kant, we are left with a view that the order of being is either revealed or disguised, that is, hidden (HO 39-40). Levinas asks us, then, to consider that the beyond means something other than how Kant has defined it. The relation between the signified and its meaning, or its significance, is in the trace—not a relationship, but rather what he calls an irrectitude.
For Levinas the typical understanding of sign and signified is that of a relationship that is mediated. But the trace is precisely a relationship that eludes this mediation. The trace, which signifies beyond being, also signifies into the past, which he calls an immemorial past—beyond memory:
Beyond being is a Third person who is not defined by the Oneself, by ipseity. He is the possibility of the third direction of radical irrectitude that escapes the bipolar game of immanence and transcendence proper to being, where immanence always wins out over transcendence. (HO 40, emphasis in original)
The face comes from this beyond but in the “form” of the third person, which Levinas names illeity. It is important to remember here that when Levinas says third person, he does not mean a third individual. He means a reference to a second person but in the third person from a grammatical point of view. Why is this significant? For Levinas, this reference to illeity, to He, to the third person pronoun, signifies irreversibility—as opposed to a reference to “you,” which registers mutuality, reversibility, or exchange. Indeed, he says declaratively, “the illeity of the third person is—the condition of irreversibility,” or what we might refer to as the asymmetry central to his discussions in Totality and Infinity. The third person—as the face—withdraws from both revelation and dissimulation. And as such, it is the Infinity of the absolutely Other (HO 41).
In his interview with Philippe Nemo, broadcast on the radio in early 1981 and published as Ethics and Infinity, Levinas responds to Nemo’s question about how the ethical relationship makes us escape the “solitude of being.” The concern Nemo has is this: if we are no longer in being, where are we? Are we not only left with society? Levinas responds by recalling the Infinity of Totality and Infinity:
I am not afraid of the word God, which appears quite often in my essays. To my mind the Infinite comes in the signifyingness of the face. The face signifies the Infinite. It never appears as a theme, but in this ethical signifyingness itself; that is, in the fact that the more I am just the more I am responsible; one never quits with regard to the Other. (EI 105)
He continues his answer by referencing hineni, the Hebrew for “Here I am” [me voici], a phrase often uttered by those most responsible in the Hebrew Bible: Noah and Abraham in particular. In the Hebrew expression, which Levinas deploys repeatedly (particularly in his 1974 work, Otherwise than Being), he tries to evoke the already-readiness of the expression—the being ready to respond before one is called. The “Here I am” signifies the Other: one is ready for someone. For Levinas, this is how the Infinite enters language—even though it is not seen. And to be clear, this not being seen is not a “not being seen yet” or “being invisible.” God not being seen is God not thematizable, God beyond visible and invisible. Yet, the most fascinating part of this particular response to Nemo is Levinas’s turn to Jewish mysticism. He explains that in many old prayers, the pious one begins by praying to God and using the referent Thou, but he finishes by saying He “as if in the course of this approach of the ‘Thou’ its transcendence into ‘He’ supervened. It is what in my descriptions I called the ‘illeity’ of the Infinite.” Tying all these themes together, Levinas explains to Nemo that in saying “Here I am,” the ethical subject “testifies” to the Infinite. This testimony is not truth by representation. Rather it is simply through the testimony itself, through the response to the other that the Infinite “glorifies itself” (EI 106-107).
Returning then to his discussion in “Signification and Sense,” a third path is required since for Levinas the trace cannot be reached, cannot be comprehended. It does not belong to phenomenology and thus eludes the empirical gaze. But it is not out of the empiricist’s grasp because it is hidden; it is beyond this dichotomy. And while the trace is not a sign, it may function like a sign. Levinas uses the example of a detective who investigates a crime scene, or a hunter who is following the trace of game for which he searches. In these instances, like the check written intentionally to leave a trace of payment, there is inscribed in the world order, in the experience of the world, a trace which Levinas characterizes as disturbing the world order: “It is ‘superimposed’” (HO 41). The person who left traces while also trying to erase those traces (so as to commit the perfect crime) irreparably disturbed that order.
To illustrate the point more clearly, Levinas ends this discussion with a summary of Exodus 33 where he describes Moses seeing the back of God. Here God leaves a trace, or shows Himself only in a trace. Thus, like the “here I am” to which he refers in his interview with Nemo, for Levinas, going toward God means not going toward the trace—that would be to miss the point. It means going toward others who stand in the trace of illeity—the thirdness, the he-ness. In his longer essay devoted solely to the trace, he refers to illeity as the origin of alterity.27 To go toward others means to move beyond reciprocity, to exceed the calculation that defines the economies of the world. Rather it is to place ethics and the ethical relationship in a permanent state of irrectitude—that which cannot be “corrected.” Thus, the absolutely Other is not, like a need, extinguished in pleasure. It is infinite. The trace, then, rather than leaving evidence for what has happened, disturbs the world order and leaves it unsettled, just as the ghost disturbs the world it was presumed to have left.
* * *
To conclude, then, in this essay we have begun to catch a glimpse of the subtle and seemingly elusive connections to be made among the face, the trace, and the ghost in a tragedy of Shakespeare as read backward through the lens of Levinas. To reverse the famous equation of Harold Bloom, even the strongest literary precursors may in fact be changed irreparably by their successors.28 It is our argument here that after reading Levinas and taking his ethical message to heart, we can in fact never read Shakespeare in quite the same way again. In Negative Dialects, the critical theorist Theodor Adorno walks back his now famous and oft-quoted phrase that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”29 He modifies his previous thought to say, “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured man has to scream.”30 His comment is taken as a response to reading Paul Celan, a French poet associated intimately with suffering, survival, and the Shoah. Following this line, Adorno then queries if one has the right to live—that is, if one has survived Auschwitz—that is, when one was meant to be killed. We are inclined, then, to take this assertion one step further, but in a slightly more Levinasian direction. After Auschwitz, we can no longer read the Western Canon in the same way as it was read before the atrocities of the Holocaust. Shakespeare’s evident obsession with knocking, speaking, and faces—and the ethical imperative they signify—will from now on be eternally colored for us by the Levinasian resonances of those terms. Shakespeare’s insight that existence is a necessity from which one cannot escape, precisely because of the ethical obligation that binds us to an Other, resonates deeply with Levinas’s ethical project. If it is the case that the whole of philosophy is a meditation on Shakespeare, it might also be the case that the whole of Shakespeare cannot escape the claim of Levinas’s ethical Other.
It may not even seem too fanciful a stretch to say that in this essay we as scholars have been performatively knocking, knocking, knocking at the gate as in Macbeth’s memorable scene of the porter. Levinas has effectively become a gate-keeper to Shakespeare: we have to go through him now in order to arrive at the textual edifice or castle. Throughout this extended comparative meditation we too have been knocking, knocking, knocking as we have sought to unlock the mysteries of this play.
In closing, by means of this interdisciplinary dialogue, we would modify slightly the gate-keeper’s parting words: “I pray you, remember the porter.” Instead, we would leave our reader with the admonition: “We pray you, remember the Other.” Such is the ethical bottom line or common denominator for both Shakespeare and Levinas. An important corollary to this has been to show how a more overtly religious reading of Levinas—which, we would argue, is merely an effort to restore his original, unapologetic religiosity—leads to the realization that to glimpse the face of the Other is to see the face of God.
1 See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994) and Ken McMullen, Ghost Dance (1983).
2 Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” in Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark C. Taylor, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 359, emphasis ours. Levinas repeatedly uses the term “visitation” when talking about the face in Humanism of the Other.
3 Jeremy Tambling argues that Macbeth shares his wife’s imperviousness to the Other, declaring starkly in reference to time that “its otherness cannot impinge on him” (Jeremy Tambling, “Levinas and Macbeth’s ‘Strange Images of Death’,” Essays in Criticism 54 [2004]: 351-372, 357). We would differ with him here, instead seeing a hierarchy of moral sensibility in which Lady Macbeth figures lower on the ethical scale.
4 Jeremy Tambling interprets this vision as a precursor of Macbeth’s own disembodied head which will be paraded across the stage at the end of the play: “the first apparition was an armed head, a head so framed it cannot show signs of horror, its identity remaining ambiguous till it turns out to be Macbeth’s” (Tambling, “Levinas and Macbeth’s ‘Strange Images of Death,’” 364). This could well be, but the interpretation is rather fanciful and seems not directly supported by the text. At the very least, we believe other interpretations are also possible.
5 Juliet’s power to die would thus form a contrast to Jeremy Tambling’s claim that Macbeth does not have the power to die: “Macbeth is deprived of the power to die. The individual has overcome the other in order to assert his existence, but that commits him to the assertion of unceasing mastery” (Tambling, “Levinas and Macbeth’s ‘Strange Images of Death,’” 365).
6 See also the discussion in Totality and Infinity—specifically in “The Love of Life” subsection of “I and Dependence.” Here Levinas says, “Suicide is tragic, for death does not bring resolution to all problems to which birth gave rise, and is powerless to humiliate the values of the earth—whence Macbeth’s final cry in confronting death, defeated because the universe is not destroyed at the same time as his life. Suffering at the same time despairs for the being riveted to being—and loves the beginning to which it is riveted. It knows the impossibility of quitting life” (TI 146). See also TI 231.
7 Andrew Cutrofello, All for Nothing: Hamlet’s Negativity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).
8 Cutrofello, All for Nothing, 83.
9 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962), 307.
10 Levinas, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003).
11 See Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
12 Jeffrey Berman, Empathic Teaching: Education for Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004).
13 Ibid., Empathic Teaching, 101.
14 http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/06/08/euroupdate-2-is-science-art/, consulted 13 January 2015.
15 Oxford English Dictionary online, consulted 13 January 2015.
16 Megan Craig, Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 60-61.
17 The latter of these was published not only several years after Totality and Infinity but also after the appearance of “Signification and Sense” (1963).
18 Craig, Levinas and James, 61.
19 Ibid., Levinas and James, 62, our emphasis.
20 Ibid., Levinas and James, 62.
21 Ibid., Levinas and James, 62.
22 Howard Caygill observes, “perhaps because of its Christian commitments, personalism is a body of thought barely noted in contemporary continental philosophy, which remains almost Jacobin in its secular prejudices” (Howard Caygill, “Levinas’s Political Judgement: The Esprit Articles 1934-1983,” Radical Philosophy 104 [2000]: 6-15, 6). For an excellent treatment of this point, see Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
23 See Hilaire Kallendorf, “Intertextual Madness in Hamlet: The Ghost’s Fragmented Performativity,” Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 22 (1998): 69-87.
24 Nicholas Royle, in The Uncanny, connects Derrida’s ghosts with teaching (Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003]). Derrida writes: “To learn to live, to learn it from oneself and by oneself, all alone, to teach oneself live … is that not impossible for a living being? Only from the other and by death. In any case from the other at the edge of life. At the internal border or the external border it is a heterodidactics between life and death” (from Specters, xviii quoted in Royle, The Uncanny, 67). See Jacques Derrida, The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International (London: Routledge, 2006).
25 In her unpublished essay, “The Trace in Levinas and Derrida,” Bettina Bergo explores the use of the trace in both Levinas and Derrida. It is highly instructive for those interested in this particular concept. In particular, she observes the following point about Levinas: “Now, if the trace, for Levinas, refers to what cannot appear—glory, the face of the other, a dynamic collection of aphanological conditions—then it is also tied up with the complex of memory, affectivity, and the birth of signification.” Presented to the Canadian Philosophical Association, London, Ontario, May 2005. Accessed online, December 2014, via Bergo’s academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/1705190/The_Trace_in_Derrida_and_Levinas.
26 Richard Cohen, xxix, introduction to Humanism of the Other.
27 See HO 44 and Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” 359.
28 See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). See also the same author’s A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
29 Theodor Adorno, Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 34. The quote is often written or said as, “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz.”
30 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1994), 362. See also Adorno’s Metaphysics lectures where Adorno comments on this particular quote: “I would readily concede that, just as I said after Auschwitz one could not write poems—by which I meant to point to the hollowness of the resurrected culture of that time—it could equally be said, on the other hand, that one must write poems, in keeping with Hegel’s statement in his Aesthetics that as long as there is an awareness of suffering among human beings there must also be art as the object form of that awareness. And, heaven knows, I do not claim to be able to resolve this antinomy, and presume even less to do so since my own impulses are precisely on the side of art, which I am mistakenly accused of wishing to suppress” (Theodor Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems [Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000], Lecture 14, page 110).