Love, War, and the Other in Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient as the Dialogic Field

Abstract

Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1992) has been celebrated for its dramatic scenario tying together themes of espionage, nationalism and traumatic love during the Second World War. Seeking to extend the novel's most commonly explored topics regarding the problem of Western humanism and the characters' troubled identities, this article offers an ethical examination of it. It brings Ondaatje's novel into a dialogue with Levinas's response to the dead end of humanistic enterprise in the West, by critically drawing on the three writers' discussion of face, patience, and eros as conduits through which a removal of ontological aggrandizement of the self is envisioned. Derrida's criticism of Carl Schmitt, on the other hand, helps direct Levinas's thread of thought toward a more contextualized interrogation of the friend/enemy dualism in wartime, during which the other is separated only to be assimilated. For Ondaatje, registering his characters' affective mobility of identity in transit invites readers to contemplate the long-held self-sustaining system in the West. Delving into the approaching death faced by Almasy and Katharine, Ondaatje considers the act of mourning as a gesture marking a specific manner of bearing responsibility-a form of responsibility for others that goes beyond existentialist accounts of intersubjectivity. This consideration of the act of mourning is shared by Levinas and Derrida, relating as it does to the ways in which they regard mourning as a reflection of time in patience and as an ethical reaction to the aggressive practices of homogenization that results from the self's one-way communication with the other.