“It sometimes seems to me,” writes Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), “that the whole of philosophy is only a meditation on Shakespeare” (TO 47). In this essay I wish to reflect on 1) how Shakespeare figures in Levinas’s philosophical development from the time of the appearance of Existence and Existents and Time and Other, both published just after the Second World War, through Humanism of the Other and Otherwise than Being in the early 1970s); and 2) how Levinas’s thought can, in turn, open up the ethical dimension of Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear, three plays that Levinas particularly admired.1 In the course of my essay I will also refer to the work of Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), the great anti-Hegelian philosopher and author of The Star of Redemption, which had such a powerfully formative influence on Levinas’s thought.
I begin by focusing on Levinas’s notion of what he describes as the horrifying impersonality and “irremissibility” (i.e., the no-exit quality) of Being, of the “there is,” the “il y a,” which he sees articulated in Macbeth and Hamlet. Levinas’s reflection on the “there is,” he notes in a conversation with Philippe Nemo, “starts with childhood memories. One sleeps alone, the adults continue life; the child feels the silence of his bedroom as [a] ‘rumbling’ [bruissant]” (EI 48). In this same interview, Levinas says that his friend Maurice Blanchot comes close to articulating what Levinas himself means by the chilling anonymity of the “there is” when Blanchot, in his fiction, speaks of “A night in a hotel room where, behind the partition, ‘it does not stop stirring’[’ça n’arrête pas de remuer’]; ‘one does not know what they are doing next door’” (EI 50).
Neither Heideggerian anxiety about death nor Sartrean “nausea,” for Levinas, accounts for the “horror” generated by the il y a, a horror in which “the subject is stripped of his subjectivity, of his power to have private existence. The subject is depersonalized.… [H]orror turns the subjectivity of the subject, his particularity qua entity, inside out [à l’envers]. It is participation in the there is, in the there is which returns in the heart of every negation, in the there is that has ‘no exits’ [sans issue]” (EE 56). One can try to exit the “there is,” for Levinas, through what he calls “hypostasis,” (i.e.) through knowing, through positing oneself as a knowing subject. But Levinas, who was no irrationalist, associated knowing with an assertive grasping of the true, and hence even with violence. Knowing, for Levinas, is burdened with a likely forgetting—not, as in Heidegger, of Being, but rather of a forgetting of one’s prior and infinite obligation to the Other, an obligation which precedes knowing and its light.
Knowing, for Levinas, is thus a solitude. We can exit the “il y a,” or the essential solitude of the knowing subject, for Levinas, only through the ethical relation, i.e., through a responding to and a taking responsibility for the Other. Time, for Levinas, is the time of the Other, not Hegelian time, in which the imperial subject violently assimilates everything alien in its path. Macbeth is therefore not, for Levinas, a true self, a self straightaway for the Other. In the play, Macbeth starts out as an ethical self, to be sure, which is what so troubles Lady Macbeth, who worries that Macbeth’s “nature” is “too full o’th’milk of human kindness” (1.5.17) to go through with the plan to murder Duncan. In her ruthless pursuit of power, Lady Macbeth rejects the very maternity that, as I shall argue at the end of this paper, Lear ultimately embraces. As Lady Macbeth tells her husband, whose resolve to go through with the planned murder is wavering:
I have given suck, and know
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. (1.7.54-59)
Macbeth, in the murderous course of the play, becomes the imperial self par excellence. Macbeth intuits the portentously murderous dimension of the purely imperial self when, earlier in the play, he is stunned to realize that he has suddenly fulfilled the first two predictions in the Weird Sisters’ prophecy. He has become the Thane first of Glamis and then of Cawdor, and he now finds himself on the glorious as well as terrifying brink of fulfilling the entire prophecy. All that now remains, Macbeth realizes, is the coveted Kingship itself:
Two truths are told,
As happy prologues to the swelling act
Of the imperial theme. (1.3.128-130).
The only way out, the only escape from “the fatality of irremissible being,” for Levinas, lies in the subject’s responsiveness to, in his responsibility for, the Other. We might be reminded here of an observation of one of Levinas’s masters, Franz Rosenzweig. In The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig remarks as follows on the isolated self before, inspired by revelation, it moves out of its isolation towards the neighbor, whom the self—through revelation—is commanded to love and thence to redeem:
The future is no future without this anticipation [of the future] and the inner Compulsion for it; without this “wish to bring about the Messiah before his time” and the temptation to “coerce the kingdom of God into being”; without these, it is only a past distended endlessly and projected forward. For without such anticipation, the moment is not eternal; it is something that drags itself everlastingly along the long, long trail of time [ein sich immerwährend Weiterschleppendes auf der langen Heerstrasse der Zeit]. (Star 227; Stern 254)
The fatiguing and utterly dispiriting experience of a future that “drags itself everlastingly along the long, long trail of time” sounds very much like Macbeth’s “Tomorrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow” which “Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time” (M 5.5.19-21).2
This would not be the first allusion in Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Earlier in this section (Part II) of The Star, Rosenzweig asserts that the name of God “is in truth word and fire, and not sound and fury [Schall und Rauch] as unbelief would have it again and again in obstinate vacuity” (Star 188; Stern 209). Rosenzweig is clearly alluding here to the famous conclusion of Macbeth’s famous soliloquy, cited above, in which the murderous and world-weary King says that life “is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / signifying nothing” (5.5.26-28). The only way out of the self’s isolation, for both Levinas and Rosenzweig, is through an obedience to the command to love your neighbor, (i.e.) through the ethical relation. Rosenzweig’s “word and fire” [Wort und Feuer] point the reader to the Bible, specifically to the word of God and to the celestial Chariot (merkavah) of the first chapter of Ezekiel, which Rosenzweig discusses in Part III of The Star of Redemption.3 For Rosenzweig, the “word and fire” of the celestial Chariot of Ezekiel’s vision already obligates us, turns us toward our neighbor, whom we are obliged to love and thus to redeem. The “sound and fury” of existence may be meaningless for a murderous Macbeth, who has betrayed his obligation to the Other, but the “word and fire” of Ezekiel’s vision, for Rosenzweig, turns us toward our neighbor.
Let us return to Levinas. In Time and the Other, Levinas comments on the scene, at the end of Macbeth, in which the protagonist demonstrates the inability of the hero to assume death. Macbeth will heroically continue to fight, no matter how futile the consequences: “Though Birnham Wood be come to Dunsinane,” the King tells Macduff, “and thou opposed, being of no woman born, / Yet I will try the last” (5.8.30-32). In Existence and Existents, Levinas comments on how the ghost of Banquo haunts the consciousness of Macbeth, who experiences “the impossibility of escaping from an anonymous and uncorruptible existence,” an impossibility of escape that, for Levinas, “constitutes the final depths of Shakespearean tragedy. The fatality of the tragedy of antiquity [as Rosenzweig observes in The Star] becomes the fatality of irremissible being” (EE 57). Likewise, “Hamlet recoils before the ‘not to be’ because he has a foreboding of the return of being (‘to dye, to sleepe, perchance to Dreame’).” As Levinas remarks in Time and the Other, “Hamlet is precisely a lengthy testimony to this impossibility of assuming death. Nothingness is impossible” (TO 73).
Hamlet attempts to escape from the isolation of Being first through irony (“A little more than kin, and less than kind” [1.2.65]; “I am too much in the ‘son’” [1.2.67]), and then, towards the end of the play, through taking action, no matter how rash that action (“And praised be rashness for it” [5.2.7]). Prince Hamlet possesses a most remarkable interiority which is never, finally, shattered by exteriority, by the Other. Quite to the contrary, the obsessively self-reflective Hamlet rashly and mistakenly kills Polonius and is responsible, in part as a result of his cruelty towards Ophelia, for her suicide. Hamlet is, finally, irresponsible—a rightful heir to the throne who is temperamentally incapable of taking on the responsibilities of the kingship of Denmark.
Hamlet’s individuality, his unique personhood, it is true, stands in sharp contrast to the interchangeably characterless duo of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Hamlet’s college classmates who have been hired by the King to spy on the Prince. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are mere role players, ciphers who justify their toadying actions on the grounds that the King’s subjects are, necessarily, cogs in a large and impersonal, if necessary, machine. As Rosencrantz pompously and fawningly remarks to a frankly unimpressed King Claudius:
The single and peculiar life is bound
With all the strength and armour of the mind
To keep itself from noyance; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests
The lives of many. The cess [i.e. cessation] of majesty
Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw
What’s near it with it; or it is a massy wheel
Fixed on the summit of the highest mount
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised [fastened securely] and adjoined, which when it falls
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone
Did the king sigh but with a general groan.
(3.3.11-23)
Hamlet was right, earlier in the scene, when he accused his erstwhile school friends of trying to “play upon” him like a pipe and thus to violate his alterity, his otherness: “You would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery” (3.2.355-358). In Totality and Infinity, Levinas remarks that “The real must not only be determined in its historical objectivity, but also from interior intentions, from the secrecy that interrupts the continuity of historical time. Only starting from this secrecy is the pluralism of society possible” (TI 57-58). Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are purely political men. They are not ethical, in the Levinasian sense. Indeed, they represent the trumping of ethics by politics. They attempt to “pluck out the heart” of the mystery that is Prince Hamlet, to violate his otherness.
True sociality, for Levinas, “would render justice to that secrecy which for each is his life, a secrecy which does not hold to a closure which would isolate some rigorously private domain of a closed interiority, but a secrecy which holds to the responsibility for the Other.” From this responsibility for the Other, for Levinas, “one does not escape,” for this ethical responsibility is itself the very “the principle of absolute individuation” (EI 81). “I” am the responsible one, the chosen one incapable of escaping from my responsibility for the Other. Prince Hamlet clings to his “private domain of a closed interiority,” from which he never escapes, or which he never transcends. But Hamlet does manage to evade what Levinas calls, above, “the principle of absolute individuation,” which Richard Cohen, in discussing Totality and Infinity, refers to as the way in which, for Levinas, the other impinges “on the self in its most first person singularity” producing “the singularizing of the self as responsibility, responsibility for the other” (Levinasian Meditations 177).
Hamlet’s evasion of Levinas’s “principle of absolute individuation,” of the responsible self, becomes disappointingly clear in the lines he speaks to Laertes—whose father and sister have now become the lifeless victims of Hamlet’s actions—towards the end of the play before their fatal duel. Hamlet, the deeply introspective prince with a rich inner life who chose to feign madness (in the first act of the play [1.5.170], he had told his dear friend Horatio of his intention to “put an antic [wild; fantastic] disposition on”), now hypocritically casts himself as the helpless victim of that very contrived madness. Hamlet’s speech begins with what appears will be an acceptance of responsibility: “Give me your pardon, sir. I have done you wrong.…” (5.2.204). But who is this “I”? Not the responsible “I,” not Levinas’s “principle of absolute individuation.” Hamlet’s “I” in this speech is, rather, reminiscent of the “I” of the Homeric hero, of an Agamemnon evading responsibility for his own foolish and destructive actions, and blaming the gods:
This presence [audience] knows, and you must needs have heard,
How I am punished with a sore distraction.
What I have done
That might your nature, honor, and exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.
Was Hamlet wronged Laertes? Never Hamlet.
If Hamlet from him self be ta’en away
And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not; Hamlet denies it.
Who does it then? His madness. If’t be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged—
His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy. (5.2.206-217)
Macbeth and Hamlet, then, never escape the solitude of being. When Hamlet returns to Denmark from his aborted trip to England, he happens upon the funeral of Ophelia, although he at first doesn’t realize that the grave that is being dug is for her body. The gravedigger produces the skull of Yorick, the King’s jester, which prompts Hamlet’s melancholic reflections on death (“Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and how now abhorred in my imagination it is. My gorge rises at it” (5.1.174-178)). Hamlet’s reflections are moving, it is true, and he does express real affection for the departed jester, but for this reader, at least, Hamlet’s feelings for Yorick appear more to reflect the Prince’s preoccupation with his own death rather than with the death of Yorick, the death of the other. Hamlet is unable to escape his solitude. In King Lear, in contrast, Shakespeare creates a tragic protagonist who—bareheaded on the heath, bereft of the crown of his sovereignty—experiences an eruption of ethics and dies more concerned with the death of the Other, in the case of Lear with the death of his daughter Cordelia, than with his own death.
In his last great work, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974), Levinas likens the true self to the maternal self, to maternity itself. In contrast to the conventionally accepted notion, since the European Enlightenment, that the self is absolutely autonomous, sovereign, imperial, like Lear’s at the beginning of Shakespeare’s play, Levinas argues that the experience of maternity more accurately signifies what it is like to be a self, for the mother cares more for the life of her child than for her own life. Maternity figures as an analogy to the self who is straightaway for the Other both in King Lear and in Levinas’s later work (Humanism of the Other and Otherwise than Being), which explicitly and implicitly alludes to Lear.
Lear characterizes himself as suffering, in Act II of the play, from an attack of what was called, in Shakespeare’s day, the “mother.” Lear, in his disbelieving sorrow at how he is being treated by his daughters Regan and Goneril, remarks:
O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!
Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow,
Thy element’s below. (2.2.246-248)
As the notes to the Arden edition explain, “the mother,” or hysterica passio, “was a disease mainly of women that arose from the womb and took them ‘with choaking in the throat.’ It was called ‘Passio Hysterica,’ or, in the English, the mother, or the suffocation of the mother.”4
In Otherwise than Being, published in 1974, Levinas writes:
Sensibility is exposedness to the other … It is a having been offered without any holding back and not the generosity of offering itself, which would be an act.… it is maternity, gestation of the other in the same. Is not the worry over someone who is being persecuted but a modification of maternity, “the groaning of the entrails [gémissement des entrailles],” wounded in those who shall give birth and who have been giving birth? Responsibility for others is signified in maternity. (OB 75; translation adapted)
I will return to Levinas’s phrase “the groaning of the entrails” in a moment and to its appearance in an earlier context in Levinas’s work that explicitly refers to Shakespeare’s King Lear. But first, I wish to suggest that there is, at the very least, an implicit allusion to Lear in this section of Otherwise than Being. The section I refer to is the fifth, on “Vulnerability and Contact,” of Chapter III, entitled “Sensibility and Proximity,” of Otherwise than Being. Here Levinas is arguing that corporeal existence, the very meaning or significance of the body, is its vulnerability and proximity to the Other. Consciousness does not, in a pristine or self-contained sovereignty over itself, freely decide to constitute itself on the basis of a conception of its own materiality. “Sensible experience as an obsession by the other, or a maternity” is rather, for Levinas, “already the corporeality which the philosophy of consciousness wishes to constitute on the basis of it” (italics mine; OB 77). The matter (or mater, to make explicit the references to the Latin word made by Levinas, in this section of Otherwise than Being) of our corporeal existence is already a maternity, a giving (donner),
when giving offers not the superfluxion of the superfluous, but the bread taken out of one’s own mouth. Signification signifies, consequently, in nourishing, clothing, lodging, in maternal relations, in which matter shows itself for the first time in its materiality [dans les rapports maternels où la matière se montre seulement dans sa matérialité]. (OB 77; AE 124)
Levinas’s phrase “the superfluxion of the superfluous” (la superfluxion du superflu) has, I suggest, a Shakespearean provenance, as does the very title of Otherwise than Being, in which Levinas states, in the book’s third paragraph, that Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” is precisely not the question where transcendence is concerned (OB 3; italics mine; Levinas refers to Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the previous paragraph). And as do, in a general sense, Levinas’s reflections, in these opening paragraphs of Autrement qu’être, on the “undethron-able royalty” of the verb être (“to be”) in “our languages,” which “would be the very purple of this royalty” (OB 4). For Levinas, ethics dethrones any notion of the sovereign, imperial self. Kingship, in Shakespeare’s great tragedies, signifies precisely such sovereignty. These tragedies tell the story, for Levinas, of the sovereign ego’s necessary dethroning in the wake of the eruption of ethics.
The word superfluxion in Levinas’s phrase “le superfluxion du superflu” appears nowhere else in French. It is Levinas’s own coinage. It is a coinage, however, apparently borrowed, and then gallicized, from Shakespeare, who had himself previously coined the word “superflux” in Lear’s speech on the heath, in which Lear—for the first time—recognizes, too late (for he is now no longer king), his obligations to the poor, to the other. Before speaking these lines, in a remarkably Levinasian gesture of “Après vous, Monsieur,” Lear, in the midst of a terrible storm, asks his poor Fool to enter a protective hovel before he himself does:
[to the Fool] In boy, go first. You houseless poverty
Nay, get thee in. I’ll pray, and then I’ll sleep.
[Kneels.] Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp,
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just. (3.4.26-36)
In his curious phrase “superfluxion du superflu,” Levinas’s “superfluxion” appears to have been influenced by the word “superflux” in this passage.
For the inspiration for the word “superflu” we might, I suggest, again turn to King Lear, specifically to the word “superfluous” used first by Lear and then by Gloucester. The first instance occurs in Act II. Regan and Goneril have just announced that they are about to completely strip Lear of his already significantly reduced group of royal retainers. “What need one?” Regan asks. Lear angrily responds with the famous words, “O, reason not the need!” and he then goes on to say, “Our basest beggars/ Are in the poorest thing superfluous” (2.2.452-454). The Arden editors gloss this sentence as follows: “the poorest beggars have some miserable possession that is superfluous to their needs.”5 Gloucester’s use of the word “superfluous” occurs in his reference to what he now sees, in regard to his own character in Act IV, as the selfishness of a “superfluous and lust-dieted man.” After Cornwall barbarously blinds Gloucester, the old man, now humbled, gives money to “Poor Tom,” who is in fact his son Edgar (in disguise), whom Gloucester has so terribly wronged:
Here, take this purse, thou whom the heaven’s plagues
Have humbled to all strokes. That I am wretched
Makes thee the happier. Heavens deal so still!
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly:
So distribution should undo excess
And each man have enough. (4.1.67-73)
Levinas’s phrase “gémissement des entrailles” (a “groaning [or ‘moaning’] of the entrails”), which appears towards the beginning of the section on “Vulnerability and Contact” in Otherwise than Being in 1974, in fact first appears in Levinas’s writing two years earlier in Humanism of the Other, a book that begins with an epigraph from King Lear: “I should e’en die with pity/ to see another thus” (4.7.53-54). Lear is here speaking to the angelic Cordelia, with whom he has just been reunited, and registering how stunned he is by Regan’s and Goneril’s inhuman treatment of their father. Regan and Goneril are incapable of pity, and of shedding tears. Lear, in contrast, learns to weep in the course of the play, as he unforgettably remarks to Cordelia several lines before he utters the words that Levinas chose as the epigraph to Humanism of the Other:
Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead. (4.7.45-48)
In the foreword to Humanism of the Other, Levinas calls into question philosophy’s venerable aversion to tears. The violence that represses weeping, Levinas writes, “or would have strangled it forever does not even belong to the race of Cain; it is the daughter of Hitler, or his adopted daughter” (HO 6). Regan and Goneril are, by implication for Levinas, Hitler’s daughters, or his adopted daughters.
Later in Humanism of the Other, in a footnote, Levinas explains what he means, in the body of the text, by referring to “mercy” as a “moaning of the entrails” (HO 64): “We have in mind here,” Levinas writes, “the biblical term rakhamim, translated as mercy but bearing a reference to the word for uterus, rehkhem; it means mercy that is like an emotion from maternal entrails” (HO 76).
At the moment of his death, Lear is concerned not at all with his own death, in the manner of Heideggerian sorge, but rather with the death of the Other, with Cordelia, whose body, earlier in this last scene of the play, he had carried like a madonna cradling the dying Christ. Lear, in his caring for Cordelia, becomes the very embodiment of mercy, of pietà:
No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life
And thou no breath at all? O thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.
[to Edgar?] Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir.
O, o, o, o.
Do you see this? Look on her: look, her lips,
Look there, look there! He dies. (5.3.304-310)
Lear, on more than one level, is here dying of “the mother.”6 He is choking, which is why he politely asks Edgar [assuming Lear is addressing Edgar here] to “undo” the “button” below his collar, for which Lear politely thanks him. Though Lear is dying, he is not thinking of his own death. He is, rather, after emitting a moan from his maternal entrails in l. 308 (“O, o, o, o”), hoping to see some signs of life on the lips of his beloved daughter Cordelia, some signs of life in the face of the Other, for whom he feels—as if he were himself Cordelia’s mother—deeply, infinitely, and inescapably responsible.
Reprinted courtesy of Levinas Studies (Duquesne University Press). Originally appeared as “From Solitude to Maternity: Levinas and Shakespeare,” vol. 8, 2013, pp. 67–79.
1 Levinas tells Philippe Nemo that among the first “great books” he encountered, after the Bible and before philosophy, were “the Russian classics … and also the great writers of Western Europe, notably Shakespeare, much admired in Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear” (EI 22). On Levinas and Shakespeare, see Cohen, Levinasian Meditations 150-168 and Other Others 93-106. See also Robbins 85, 92, 95, 96, and 134 and, more recently, Doenges and Lawrence. Robbins mentions that, in Existence and Existents, “Levinas hints at an extended reading of Macbeth in terms of the il y a” (96). Doenges gives us that extended reading. Lawrence, with his emphasis on Shakespeare’s depictions of human generosity in Lear, counters those who read that play as offering no redemptive possibilities beyond endless gestures of mere self-interest. The present essay tries to place Shakespeare’s three greatest tragedies (Macbeth, Hamlet, and Lear) in the context of Levinas’s own developing ideas as a philosopher, as well as to suggest how, if we read these plays with Levinas’s thought in mind, we can see in them as yet unrevealed ethical depths.
2 Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: A & C Black, 1951; rpt.1984), 153-154.
3 See Mosès, who describes how Rosenzweig’s allusion to the celestial Chariot refers, in the Kabbala, to cosmic creation, while the Shechinah and Tikkun refer, respectively, to cosmic revelation and cosmic redemption (System and Revelation 279).
4 Arden Lear, 241-242, citing Jordan, A Brief Discourse of a Disease Called the Mother (1603).
5 Arden edition, 255.
6 Lear is not the only male figure in the play whose giving to the other is figured, by Shakespeare, as a kind of “maternity”: When Gloucester asks who he, Edgar (who is in disguise) is, Edgar replies: “A most poor man, made tame to fortune’s blows, / Who, by the art of known and feeling sorrows, / Am pregnant to good pity. Give me your hand; / I’ll lead you to some biding [dwelling]” (4.6.217-220). As the Arden editors explain, Edgar is here saying that circumstances have taught him to become “open to (or, like a pregnant woman, big with) compassion for others” (Lear 344).