The Ethics of an Expressionless Gaze: Samuel Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu

Abstract

In her contribution to a recent collection of Beckett criticism, Luce Irigaray seeks to clarify what might be meant by the pervasive and murky term of ethical parlance: “the other.” She wants to preserve its ethical force from a popular, desiccated meaning common in everyday speech that promotes something like interpersonal respect. Too often, Irigaray says, discussions invoking “the other” bypass the sheer difference of another human being and try to shape it into a palatable sameness. This tendency is not simply a bad habit perpetuated for the sake of convenience; rather, it has deep (and not necessarily bad) roots in Western cultures. Irigaray explains that Western cultures, for example, teach that we ought to meet visitors with hospitality, as demonstrated whenever we open our homes to them and even, if need be, offer them a bed in a “guest room.” This offering, Irigaray claims, is entirely on our own terms, and, as magnanimous as it may be, it has little to do with encountering the other: “It corresponds to a kind of space for hospitality, in fact neutral or indifferent with respect to whoever is coming toward us. We are not yet available to the call of the other.” If opening my home to a stranger does not constitute a meeting with the other, then what, if anything, does? Irigaray suspects that we have domesticated otherness in order to avoid risking our secure sense of self. If I, for example, make a point to befriend people whose attitudes differ from my own, they may broaden my own perspective on things (again, not necessarily a bad thing, as such), but I remain entrenched in my own—somewhat enlarged—subjective position. “To recognize the existence of another subjectivity implies recognizing that it belongs to, and constitutes, a proper world, which cannot be substituted for mine, that the subjectivity of the other is irreducible to my subjectivity.” To what extent can there be contact between self and other if our subjectivities are “irreducible”? This is the fundamental question of Irigaray’s essay nominally about Beckett entitled “The Path toward the Other,” and, as a response, she proposes that such contact is a future possibility that will take place outside of one’s own subjective world: