Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature

Abstract

Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature. By Jill Robbins. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 1999. xxiv + 185 pp. $42; 33.50 [pounds sterling] (paperbound $16; 12.75 [pounds sterling]). The amount, range, and variety of work on Levinas and literary theory and criticism is steadily increasing. Jill Robbins's book is a substantial and important addition to the field, but also expresses a certain reservation. Robert Eaglestone's Ethical Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997) addressed the possibility of a Levinasian criticism. By contrast, my own Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas (London: Routledge; 1999) sought to connect Levinas up with contemporary theorists to produce a set of ethical readings of specific literary texts. Robbins is principally concerned with Levinas's own accounts of literature. But as she herself says, this is immediately problematic and a summons to caution. For Levinas, ethics and literature or literary criticism were incommensurable. He wrote only rarely of literature, and the place it occupies in his ethical philosophy is generally a negative one. His essays on particular writers are few. If Robbins is concerned with `altered reading' (and the significance of her title is not altogether clear) one of the `alterations' apparently implied is that we should keep Levinas and literature largely apart. Finding herself boxed into this corner, Robbins engages in a series of deft and skilful manoeuvres. The book falls into two parts. The first, which is in many ways the better of the two, consists of a scrupulous, meditative, subtle account of Levinasian ethics. Robbins is consistently attentive to the double-binds and paradoxes of Levinasian logic. But what emerges none the less is how concerned Levinas was to emphasize what he took to be the irresponsibility of art, even its monstrosity, as both a parasite on and a caricature of life. To some extent, at least, this is clearly a Jewish survivor's indignant rebuke to existential aesthetics as the latter were emerging in postwar France, and Robbins might have noted this. But her feeling for Levinas's deep distrust of the aesthetic realm, and her pursuit of the ethical arguments that stem from it, are precise and accurate. In the second half of the book, however, she turns rather to the question of how far Levinas's anti-aesthetic position can be unpicked at the edges. …