Abandonment

Blanchot:

We must not doubt that suffering weighs more heavily on us to the extent that our estrangement from religious consolations, the disappearance of the other world, and the breaking up of traditional social frameworks deprive the one who suffers of all distance and more clearly expose him to the truth of suffering: a truth that consists in withdrawing from him the space that suffering requires, the little time that would make his suffering possible.

The truth of suffering? But we are protected, some of us at least, by a horizon of values which, if hypocritical, keep us from the truth in question. And when it does not? When death takes place, as Levinas writes of the war, in the absence of a shared horizon? ‘at least the victims know whither to lift their dying gaze’, writes Levinas of post-war racism, imperialism and exploitation, ‘their devastated areas belong to a world[….] What was unique between 1940 and 1945 was the abandonment’.

Abandoment. Recall that the word ‘abandon’ was Levinas’s suggestion for a translation of Heidegger’s Geworfenheit, thrownness. Abandon: isn’t this also the state of the family of Bereck Kofman when their father is taken from them? And of Bereck Kofman when he prays on the Sabbath at Auschwitz?

Abandonment. As he reminds the readers of Existence and Existents, Levinas spent the war in captivity in Germany. He does this, he claims, only to account for the absence of any discussion of the famous works of French philosophy published over those years, but he also reminds us that it was in the stalag he continued the work he began in his earlier study, On Evasion.

Who can resist the conclusion that the analyses of Existence and Existents reflect the conditions of his captivity? There is the emphasis on physical pain: ‘physical suffering in all its degrees entails the impossibility of detaching oneself from the instant of existence. It is the very irremissibility of being’. ‘In suffering there is an absence of all refuge. It is the fact of being directly exposed to being. It is made up of the impossibility of fleeing or retreating’. Exposure to being? What does this mean?

Abandonment: the tragic heroine is thrown against necessity; she is abandoned to what she cannot know and cannot determine. Freedom, necessity: the former breaks against the latter. The grandeur of tragedy lies in her rebellion. She is dashed to pieces – but for a time, she brought herself into a splendid freedom. She laments, but to lament, one has to detach oneself from the instant of existence; being is not irremissible; she finds a refuge.

For Levinas, however, it seems no such rebellion is possible; the sufferer is overwhelmed by necessity. She comes up against a limit, against which she runs up inexhaustibly. It is because he thinks of necessity as the very relationship to being that Levinas invokes what he calls the ‘tragedy of tragedy’ in Existence and Existents.

But what does he mean? Hamlet, for Levinas, is exemplary. Why this play? Hamlet is a mutation of the violent revenge tragedy, a play focused on dilemma and not revenge. Its protagonist does not have the reassurance of the mastery of thought or of action; Hamlet vacillates – not because he is planning perfect actions; when he acts, he does so rashly and his actions miscarry. Nor is it to give him time to think for he allows thinking to fall back to that region where decision is impossible, to a madness of indecision, a yes-no without resolve.

‘To be or not to be …’ Hamlet longs for death, but he fears hell; he will not take his life for fear of what will happen to him after death. But if he cannot make an alliance with death, he cannot live, either. He cannot open a path to resolute decision; he does solitary combat with the absurd. Elinsor is the hell where phantoms wander – not just his father, but Hamlet, too: phantom of resoluteness, phantom of action. And it is the same hell he would want to enclose the others. This, indeed, is why he will not murder the praying Claudio. Hamlet’s Denmark is rotten, all are damned, the royal family must be drawn into hell’s circle if the country is to be purged. And so they are. Then Fortinbras comes; hell recedes; the world retrieves itself in Elsinore. 

In his famous soliloquy, according to Levinas, Hamlet ‘understands that the “not to be” is perhaps impossible and he can no longer master the absurd, even by suicide’. ‘Hamlet is precisely a lengthy testimony to this impossibility of assuming death’; ‘To be or not to be’ is a sudden awareness of this impossibility of annihilating oneself’. Hamlet cannot escape; to exist, not to exist are each as impossible as one another. In the third act of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet cries ‘I keep the power to die’; Hamlet does not have this power. Freedom does not triumph over fate, but is overwhelmed by it.

A., one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, writes in the first part of Either/Or

Our age has lost all the substantial categories of family, state, kindred; it must turn the single individual over to himself completely in such a way, that, strictly speaking, he becomes his own creator.

The locus of the modern tragedy has changed; it no longer concerns the torsion between family and state but the plight of an individual. An individual who, moreover, is responsible for herself, for her existence – who had taken on the burden of creating herself.

What specifically characterises ancient tragedy is that the action does not proceed only from character, that the action itself has a relative admixture of suffering. Ancient tragedy, therefore, did not develop dialogue to the point of exhaustive reflection with everything merged in it; the distinct components of dialogue are actually in the monologue and chorus.

But Levinas’s Hamlet is not a tragedy of subjectivity; he does not speak as a subject and Shakespeare’s tragedies do not differ from those of Sophocles simply because he presents an interior monologue. ‘To be or not to be’: who speaks? Hamlet? Perhaps Levinas would say it is being that speaks. Being? Blanchot would prefer to write the neuter, designating by this word what is neither being nor nothingness (ne uter: neither one nor the other). Who speaks? What speaks? Vacillation; abandonment without refuge.