Enemy under My Skin: Eileen Chang'sLust, Cautionand the Politics of Transcendence

Abstract

Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy, particularly his notions of transcendence and the “face of the other,” illuminates Eileen Chang's short storyLust, Caution(Se, jie) and, to a lesser extent, Ang Lee's film adaptation.Lust, Cautiontells of an assassination plot against a collaborator with the Japanese during the second Sino–Japanese War in which the heroine's fatal decision to let go of her enemy results in the deaths of herself and her comrades. The story problematizes the status of the personal and ethical in times of war, occupation, and resistance through the heroine's path from the collective anonymity of national salvation to the theatrical solitude of underground activism and the intersubjective encounter with the face of the other. Also relevant is Hannah Arendt's theory of the (bourgeois) social, which in conjunction with its feminist revision prompts reflections on women's space of action in “dark times.”