Schedule / Horaire
Panel A: Thursday 24 April 2014, 11h-12h30.
Panel B: Friday 25 April 2014, 11h-12h30.
Room: V106A.
Leaders / Organisateurs
Sean Lawrence, University of British Columbia (Canada) and James Knapp, Loyola University Chicago (USA)
Participants
Panel A: Shakespearean Levinas
- Bruce Young, Brigham Young University (USA)
Maternity, Substitution, and Transcendence: The Feminine in Shakespeare and Levinas - Kent R. Lehnhof, Chapman University (USA)
Disincarnating God: Theology and Phenomenology in King Lear - Sean Lawrence, University of British Columbia (Canada)
The Peace of Empires and the Empire of Peace in Shakespeare and Levinas
Panel B: Levinasian Shakespeare
- David Goldstein, York University (Canada)
Blindness and Welcome in King Lear - James Kearney, University of California, Santa Barbara (USA)
Money, Sociality, Justice: The Levinasian Third and The Merchant of Venice - James A. Knapp, Loyola University Chicago (USA)
Time and the Other in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Bruce Young, Brigham Young University (USA)
Maternity, Substitution, and Transcendence: The Feminine in Shakespeare and Levinas
The “feminine” as symbolic and ontological category has overlapping, contrasting, and mutually illuminating uses in Shakespeare and Levinas. Levinas associates the feminine with welcome, mystery, and the “absolutely other” of eros. Later, he radically reinterprets the idea, linking it with the extreme vulnerability of “maternity” and substitution. Shakespeare’s female characters—objects of eros, sources of wisdom and reproof, figures experiencing or bringing about transformation and rebirth—parallel Levinas’s understandings of the feminine. Furthermore, Shakespeare’s quasi-resurrections echo Levinas’s reference to resurrection as a disruption and recommencement making possible the “infinity of time” and thus the transcendence of relationship with the other.
2. Kent R. Lehnhof, Chapman University (USA)
Disincarnating God: Theology and Phenomenology in King Lear
This paper draws on the difficult philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to discuss the complicated religiosity of King Lear. My overarching argument is that in Shakespeare’s play, as in Levinas’s philosophy, transcendence does not occur as we commune with God but as we approach our neighbor. The only epiphanies we can expect in this life are a wholly human affair–but they are no less transformative for all that.
3. Sean Lawrence, University of British Columbia (Canada)
The Peace of Empires and the Empire of Peace in Shakespeare and Levinas
Emmanuel Levinas begins Totality and Infinity by noting how his contemporaries privilege war over peace: “Does not lucidity, the mind’s openness upon the true, consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war?” Levinas’s contrasting belief in a radical and primordial peace informs his entire philosophy and hence his many but scattered references to Shakespeare. Such peace may seem contradicted by almost all of Shakespeare’s works, and certainly by a contemporary criticism dedicated to uncovering relations of power. I shall argue, nevertheless, that even the struggles within Shakespeare’s plays remain grounded in primordial recognition of the Other.
4. David Goldstein, York University (Canada)
Blindness and Welcome in King Lear
For Shakespeare, the face is a symbolic site of ethical and epistemological crisis. Is the face a mask or a mirror, a screen or a window? King Lear explores the question of the face from a perspective similar to that of Emmanuel Levinas. A Levinasian lens helps us to conceive of the play’s famous concerns—seeing, blindness, disguise, and service—in a fresh way. Shakespeare plumbs the region between the self and obligation to others, revealing a dramatic but incomplete transformation from service to hospitality. King Lear conjures the beggar’s face as the avatar of this struggle toward welcome.
5. James Kearney, University of California, Santa Barbara (USA)
Money, Sociality, Justice: The Levinasian Third and The Merchant of Venice
Levinas is one of the few philosophers for whom, as he writes, money has “dignity as a philosophical category.” In this paper, I take up Levinas’s conception of the sociality of money and its relation to ethics and justice in a reading of the famous courtroom scene from The Merchant of Venice. My contention is that a Levinasian conception of money helps clarify the complex relation between ethical asymmetry and juridical equality in the scene. My hope is to illuminate Shylock’s claim to, and desire for, a formal equality before the law, an equality founded on unknowable difference.
6. James A. Knapp, Loyola University Chicago (USA)
Time and the Other in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline
In Time and the Other Levinas worked to counter Heidegger’s ecstatic theory of time as “being-for-death,” by focusing on the movement of time as revealing the “ungraspable” nature of death. For Levinas, it is this phenomenological time that constitutes the alterity of the other person as immanent. In Cymbeline, Shakespeare’s characters confront what Levinas describes as death’s “ungraspable” nature. The ungraspable nature of death allows Levinas to develop a phenomenology that is enacted in the temporality of sociality. I will argue that Shakespeare offers a surprisingly similar phenomenology of time and the other in Cymbeline.