Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel'shtam, and Celan (review)

Abstract

New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 294 pp. $85.00. Michael Eskin's project is an interesting, ambitious, and in my view finally successful one. He would like to read Emmanuel Levinas's notion of ethical in context of Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of and both as a theoretical background for understanding Paul Celan's engagement with poetry and prose of Ossip Mandel'shtam as well as development of Celan's own poetic practice. While Levinas's notion of ethical and Bakhtin's of dialogic have certainly been studied before (although Bakhtin's notion of metalinguistic perhaps less so), implications of work of both writers for an actual third poetic practice has not, and no one has put them together in context specifically of Celan's engagement with Mandel'shtam. The strategy appears to work. An introductory chapter informs us that study follows the method of a detailed phenomenological description (p. xiii) which means a series of more or less independent studies, although thesis argument is developed throughout. A chapter on Levinasian ethics (distinguishing it on one hand from Kantian ethics and on other from Heideggerian ontology) is followed by one on Bakhtin. In this chapter, both differences between Bakhtin's socially dependent understanding of dialogic and Levinas's pre-existential ethics, and identicality of reliance of both writers upon some logic of social, some logic of intersubjective or interdividual realities, are developed. The third chapter follows Celan's inter-textual dialogue or encounter with Mandel'shtam and his practice of a poetics that confers upon his interlocutor an infinite respect while assuming by its practice an infinite responsibility for it. Chapters four, five, and six develop a close reading of Celan's work, Die Niemandsrose (The No One's Rose). The final concluding chapter asks whether a generalized poethical method is possible. Can method developed in Celan's reading of Mandel'shtam be universalized? That would mean, Eskin tells us, taking it beyond circumscribed context. Against grain of Levinas's, Bakhtin's, Mandel'shtam's, and Celan's insistence on enunciatory and ethical singularity, Eskin claims finally, it appears to be possible. If I have a criticism or two to make of Eskin's book, they are minor in comparison to book's enormous achievement. Eskin might have made more use of Walter Benjamin's theories of translation on one hand, and of Martin Buber's understanding of dialogue, ethical, and answerability (from which in fact both Levinas and Bakhtin historically derive a great deal) on other. Benjamin's essay on Task of Translator (which eschews customary ways of thinking about translation as representation for its understanding as survival, as echo of original language in target language), seems a natural for this study, if only as a point of departure. Moreover, as Buber and Rosenzweig invented discussion that in different ways all four writers pursue (think of importance of Buber's I and Thou to these writers), it would seem appropriate that their intertextual influence be brought into discussion. Moreover, more could be made of Levinas's not uncomplicated view of poetic. …