後殖民至全球化： 德賽《繼承失落的人》中列維納斯的倫理主體性

Abstract

In this thesis, I aim to implement Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical discourse as a means of exploring the ethical subjects and their aporias in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. In this Man Booker Prize winning novel, Desai illustrates the “crumbling, isolated” human condition of a postcolonial “un-belongingness” under the framework of globalization. Looking at the modern-day aporia of inheriting an identity constructed of uncertainty, melancholy, anxiety and even indifference, we see how the question of subjectivity brings forth a need of interconnection with another in order to make sense of life in the era of globalization. Due to postmodernists’ attempt to create a new center through deconstructing the notion of center itself, people are forced to take on an uncanny form of “subject-less” subjectivity. Whereas postcolonial subjects struggle to accept their new hybridity, the idea of subjectivity itself is further disfigured due to the techno-capitalistic demands of globalization. In truth, the uncanniness of being a “stranger-at-home” prevails all. In The Inheritance of Loss, the nature of subjectivity may be perceived as ethical, instead of nihilistic or ontological, overrides language, class, race, and time. Supplementing postcolonial discourses, Levinasian notions of the face, the dwelling, and community provides us with a potential “being-with” resolution that bridges over the troubled waters of globalized postcolonial subjectivity.