Here I am by the Grace of the Other and Feminism is in Disgrace

Rosalyn Diprose

 

Here I am. There are raindrops on your hair. Your "body is clear, simple, in its way perfect". I stare. Here I am, given over to you in desire, transported beyond myself. Here I am, "frankly ravished" (Coetzee,12). I carry you to the bedroom, kiss your feet, "astonished by the feeling [you] evoke" (Coetzee, 25). A simple case of innocent desire? On the contrary. Here I am, the central character in J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace: David Lurie, aged 52, an academic specialising in romantic literature, in post-apartheid South Africa, failing to keep pace with the impact of economic rationalism on the fabric of the university, divorced, philanderer, besotted with Melanie, my 20 year old student. "She does not resist. All she does is avert herself; avert her lips, avert her eyes. … Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless … As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration" (25). David in his self-delusion, will forget this insight about the death he caused by the time he is brought before the University's disciplinary committee on charges of victimisation and harassment. He will neither hear nor defend himself against the details of the charges, believing there is no reason for Melanie to lie (49) and suspecting that the charges were made under pressure from her "jealous boyfriend" and "indignant parents" (45). He accepts his guilt without remorse, wrapping himself, with the help of Byron, in a romantic image of his relationship with Melanie. Describing himself as a recalcitrant "servant of Eros" within whom "something generous … was doing its best to flower" (89), and feeling like a dog who would rather be shot than "accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts" (90), David leaves the University of Cape Town in disgrace. More disturbing than David's self-delusion and denial of the other is the difficulty the reader has in simply condemning him, not so much because we believe his own image of himself as a romantic victim of circumstance - that just serves to fuel the reader's frustration at his blindness and inaction regarding his disgrace. What saves him from the reader's hasty judgement is the impossibility of siding with a panel of the self-righteous, self-serving, and largely indifferent academics who seal his fate. More important we withhold condemnation of David in deference to Melanie, in deference to any judgment of the situation she may hold and that we urge her to make. But, from and of the other who seemed to inspire David's desire and his fall from grace, we hear and know nothing, save that which is mediated by the men who surround her.

 

Here I am. Not by my own doing, but by the grace of the Other. The grace of the Other or the "Glory of the Infinite" as Levinas has put it, the "interval of difference" (1981, 141), the alterity that is never present "save through the trace of its reclusion, as the face of a neighbor" (140). This grace of the Other is not a God above the other nor a cultural ornament, a charming action, attitude or expression that the other 'has' and that I could know. The grace of the Other is the alterity signified in the nakedness of the face of the other, but is irreducible to what I make of her through my perceptions, judgments and knowledge; a surplus that breaks through his or her form (Levinas 1987, 96); the irreducible difference that orders me to the other, that attracts, animates, that favours me, that says "thou shalt not kill", that accuses me in my egoism and of the imperialism and negation of difference this implies, but that also grants a delay in penalty, that generates, sanctifies and endows me with responsibility, goodness and subjectivity. While the trace of the other's difference is never present save through a withdrawal signified in the nakedness of her face, it also "becomes present only in my own voice" (Levinas 1981, 140). And here I am, non-indifference to that difference, disturbed by that alterity, a welcome of and openness toward the other. Here I am, in the accusative and inspired; and "this inspiration is the psyche" (114). But not a psyche reducible to consciousness of an ego closed in on and at home with itself. On the contrary, here I am out of phase with myself, as sensibility, affectivity, saying, animated corporeality open by, to and for the other. And here I am, unique as a response to and in my responsibility for the other by whose grace I am elected (126-7). The grace of the Other is the source of subjectivity and subjectivity, as sincerity, is responsibility for the other, an animated body that bears witness to alterity as "having-the-other-in-one's-skin" (115). Without choice and prior to any world, subjectivity is the trace of alterity that commands me to give to the other by "taking the bread out of my own mouth" and by "making a gift of my own skin" without reserve or thought of return (138). It is the other's difference that gets me going and I would give my all for them.

Levinas thus founds subjectivity on carnal sensibility provoked by the other's irreducible difference. This is a rare and welcome move in philosophy, consistent with a feminist ethics of difference that would base subjectivity on an intersubjectivity that remains sensitive and open to otherness. Also consistent with a feminist ethics of difference is Levinas' explanation of effacement of difference in terms of representation and objectification of the other. For him, the non-indifference to difference, the responsibility of one-for-the-other, the giving to the other inspired by the grace of the other, the sincerity of "here I am", is prior to consciousness, to action, volition, knowledge and judgment that would cover my exposure with words and wrap the other up in my terms. "Sincerity would be saying without the said" as Levinas puts it (1981, 143). Sincerity, the affective openness to the other of the here I am, or what Levinas also calls the saying, is the condition of the production of meaning, representation, objectification, and knowledge, rather than objectification of the other per se. Meaning, the said, arises through this saying of sincere subjectivity, through this "orientation ... a leap, an outside-of-oneself toward the other than oneself" (Levinas 1987, 90). But, in the perception, representation and judgment of the other that may result, the subject restabilises itself as an entity in response to the other, gathers the other into the same thus absorbing the difference, recovers from any disruption the grace of the Other provokes, and secures itself in the present of the said, the thought or the deed (Levinas 1981, 28-9). We could say then, following Levinas, that "something generous … was doing its best to flower" in David's openness to the grace of the Other but that the acts, words, judgments, thoughts and deeds that flowed from this served only to kill off the other's difference and return him to himself unchanged. This recovering of himself from the rupture of exposure inspired by the grace of the Other, his recalcitrant possession of Melanie, is the source of David's disgrace. But this formulation of disgrace poses the question: at what point does unconditional responsibility, sincerity, exposure to the other without reserve, give way to objectification and self-possession and the disfiguring of grace, the effacement of alterity, and the falling from favour this implies?

            One could be forgiven for finding in Levinas' account of subjectivity something akin to what philosophy has traditionally designated feminine; that dispersed affective carnality that exhibits a rapport with the other, not yet mature enough for judgment, will, autonomy or self-determination.[1] The similarities are striking save that with Levinas this carnal affective non-indifference to difference is not the dark side of reason, consciousness and sociality It is their very condition. But predictably, just as philosophy elevates carnality, affectivity and undecidable rapport to the status of sincere subjectivity, responsibility and an ethical relation to the other, it strips it of its feminine connotations. (Levinas does grant the welcome of the other a feminine flavour in Totality and Infinity (1969), but only to insist that feminine alterity is not yet the alterity of the ethical relation.[2] This has led to charges of masculinist bias,[3] not unlike those directed to other theorists who have sought to reformulate subjectivity in its dispersed condition but either deny or appropriate its femininity). Here I am the-one-for-the-other is neither feminine nor masculine, Levinas would say, because, as "a fission of the ultimate substantiality of the ego, sincerity is not reducible to anything ontic, or anything ontological, and leads as it were beyond or this side of everything positive, every position. It is not an act or a movement, or any sort of cultural gesture" (1981, 144). While not reducible to any cultural gesture or any position, whether masculine or feminine, sincerity or non-indifference to difference underlies the formation of those positions, identities and gestures. As with meaning in general, any work, cultural gesture, and identity arises through this  "orientation ... a leap, an outside-of-oneself toward the other than oneself" and not the other way around (Levinas 1987, 90). This radical alterity towards which the work is orientated is "not only the collaborator and the neighbor of our cultural work of expression or the client of our artistic production, but the interlocutor ... whose presence is already required for my cultural gesture of expression to be produced" (95). My identity, whether masculine or feminine, my position and the meaning of my acts, are not so much a product of my culture as if that culture is separate from others and indifferent to difference. Rather Levinas' formulation of the relation between the ethical and the ontico-ontological suggests that culture, sexed identity and the meaning of every act, as well as the transformation and undoing of these, arises from sensibility as non-indifference to difference, from the here I am for the other sincerely. And, equally, Levinas' formulation suggests that to the extent that I settle on a meaning and position in relation to the other, having tied them up in my (sexed and cultural) terms, I have betrayed the responsibility for the other by whose grace I am, I have become indifferent to difference and have therefore fallen into disgrace. I am in disgrace insofar as the meaning of the sensible content of my perception and judgment of the other presupposes an agreement between the other and me. Here, at the level of ontology, intersubjectivity as movement toward the other accomplishes community by establishing common ground between different bodies such that they belong to one social body of shared meaning and knowledge. And so I am in disgrace insofar as my perception of the other's difference subsumes what is foreign under (sexed or other) terms already established in my own social body (Levinas 1994, 100).[4]

Still, to claim this dispersed affective carnality that exhibits a rapport with the other as feminine would be historically consistent and somewhat gratifying, given its new status. However, to claim the unconditional "here I am" as feminine and ethically desirable would also imply accepting that the here I am one-for-the-other is at some point without disgrace. Would not this lead us also into the temptation of David Laurie's romanticism where I could be said to be given to the other without intention, choice or the burden of culturally bound perceptions? And does not this amount to insisting on a level of intersubjectivity where I could deny any damage to alterity that may result from my rapport with the other. As if subjectivity, even as sensibility or carnal affective openness to the other, could ever be innocent, unconditional and free from cultural baggage and from the elimination of difference this implies. Or, is it the case that, if Here I am by the grace of the Other, I am also always in the midst of cultural perceptions with their traces of sexed and ethnic positions? And therefore am I not also always in disgrace?

            To put the problem in more concrete terms. While not strictly feminine and certainly not masculine, this formulation of subjectivity could be feminist insofar as it would legitimate the origin of feminist subjectivity in an ethical response to the other whose alterity disturbs and by whose grace I am unconditionally given to the other. Let us call this care for the other without assuming the other is the same as me and without judgment of their needs. So, perhaps a woman, a feminist already sensitive to the issue of alterity, would fare better than David in responding to the grace of the Other. Indeed, there is much to suggest this in Disgrace. While it is not from Melanie that David learns the primacy of the other, the meaning of his own disgrace and the possibility of welcoming and giving to the other without negating their difference, he does receive a clue from his daughter Lucy. This lesson comes, not initially in terms of being open to sexual difference, but in terms of Lucy's openness to cultural difference in the interests of decolonisation.

            Here I am. Through the sweat on our skin, the dirt under our nails, and the sinews in our hands, we work this land together. You are my neighbour. But that neighbourhood and the cultural works it generates is not a product of what we have in common. Through and beyond the blackness of your face there is the expression of a different South Africa, an alterity that would be lost in (English) words (Coetzee 117). Here I am but only through broken English, through the grace of that alterity and its one-for-the-other, through the sensibility that inspires the gift of (my) land, of my (white) way of life and of my own skin. Here I am, Lucy for Petrus, in post-apartheid South Africa, near Grahamstown, the frontier of British colonialism, trying as hard as I can to remain open to another frontier, to make good the debt to the other that I and my culture have incurred, to open my land, culture and skin to another way of life, and to be good in difficult times. Is this the passivity of exposure to the other to which Levinas refers?. Certainly David, seeking refuge from his own disgrace with Lucy on her land, thinks initially that Lucy's relation to Petrus exhibits a kind of passivity that he, unlike Levinas, thinks is hardly worthy of merit. Yet David's thinly disguised contempt for Lucy's life only serves to highlight how impeccable her politics of difference is compared to his own. She is, I am, responsibility for the other. Or so it would seem.

However, Levinas would say that the generosity of exposure to the other is not to be found in Lucy's politics, not in her gifts of land, culture or skin, but in the sensibility, the unconditional openness by the grace of the other, that inspires them. He would say that insofar as her gifts of land, culture and skin are conscious acts that would settle the debt to the other, they, no less than David's possession of Melanie, would effect an ontological closure to the other and the disgrace this involves. Here I am, not by choice or by virtue of my volition, but by the grace of the other. For Levinas, only by understanding 'intersubjectivity' in these terms of a bond lying in "the non-indifference of persons toward one another" "beyond being" (beyond politics as well as ontology) can we conceive of a sociality that "does not absorb the difference " (1994, 103). Politics does not extend to this inaugural moment of sociality, according to Levinas, at least not at first glance. This sociality is without politics because, as Levinas has argued earlier in Otherwise than Being, it is without problems and it is without problems because it is without decision or judgment about differences (1981, 161).  Politics, understood as the organization of society for the improvement of the human survival (Levinas 1986, 29), is about the regulation of differences and of exchange, the prevention of harm from one's enemies, the promotion and maintenance of some values over others. Politics therefore presupposes judgment, decision and knowledge; judgment about what is good for one's survival and knowledge of the other, of the difference between an enemy and a friend, and of the difference between the source of harm and good.[5] That politics presupposes judgment, decision and knowledge, and that judgment, decision and knowledge involve consciousness, is why Levinas distinguishes politics from the ethical relation to the other and therefore from the responsibility of exposure to alterity. He makes the distinction in order to save alterity from reduction to the Same that is characteristic of judgment and perception. There are no decisions or judgments in the inaugural moment of sociality, in the here I am one-for-the-other that does not absorb the difference, because the alterity that commands me to the other does not appear in the other as a cultural gesture (there is no significant gesture by which comparisons and judgments could be made) and the generosity of my response is neither a cultural gesture nor an act based on a decision or judgment I make (Levinas 1981, 140 and 144). The generosity of exposure is a having been given to the other, "not the generosity of offering oneself, which would be an act" (75); this sociality of the here I am one-for-the-other is prior to any decision, judgment, and every (political, moral, and social) position (144) and this sociality precedes the empirical order of the State (116).

The difference between the gift of here I am called for by the grace of the other and the giving elected by me is the difference, remarked by Levinas, between ethics and politics. The moral-political order is inspired and directed by ethical responsibility to the other and not the other way around (Levinas 1986, 30). In one of his many formulations of the relation between the political and the ethical orders, Levinas suggests that it is by virtue of the human capacity to repress the passivity of exposure, sincerity , saying, that we are political:

[M]an can repress his saying, and this ability to keep silent, to withhold oneself, is the ability to be political. Man can give himself in saying to the point of poetry - or he can withdraw into the nonsaying of lies. Language as saying is an ethical openness to the other; as that which is said - reduced to a fixed identity or synchronized presence - it is an ontological closure to the other. (Levinas 1986, 29)

If politics presupposes withholding oneself in a moment of judgment then a feminist politics of sexual and cultural difference, Lucy's decisions and judgments about whether to welcome the other's difference and the gifts that follow, involve the suppression of the generosity of exposure to alterity that she is, despite herself. Just as David's possession of Melanie and his self-serving delusions betray his exposure to the grace of the other, so do Lucy's generous acts risk betraying the unconditional responsibility arising from her exposure to those with whom she has nothing in common. And indeed, while Lucy does not seek gratitude from Petrus in return for her gifts, she does view these gifts as the price for staying on. Feminist politics, born of grace, is also in disgrace, insofar as it is based on culturally informed perceptions and judgments of the other and their needs which would absorb the difference and insofar as seeks compensation and self-affirmation for the work it does in attempting to meet those needs.

But this separation of politics and ontology from ethics, the said from the saying, implies that the said of language, the meaning that organizes the social and constitutes our experience in common, comes after, may be inspired and interrupted by, the affectivity and sensibility of the "here I am" that bears witness to alterity in my encounter with the other, but does not inform that sensibility. The potential problem with separating the unconditional "here I am" from ontology and politics is that who the other is and what they have done (as a corporeal expression of a culture) makes no difference to my responsibility for them and openness to them. And it would make every decision, action and judgment I make, and every word I utter in response to the other, equally a disgrace; equally a betrayal of exposure to the other that precedes it and is its condition and equally a closure to the other who provokes it. But if sensibility and its ethical relation is really outside of ontology and therefore the cultural-historical-political dimension of perception, what are we to make of Levinas' claim that the other's "ineradicable difference", is not just "signified in the nakedness of the face" but also in "the expressivity of the other person's whole sensible being" (1994, 102)? Does not this expressivity belong to the ontological expression of cultural worlds by a perceiving and perceived body. Hence does not this expressivity belong to the politics and ontology that the ethical relation is said to inaugurate and exceed? And if the ethical relation is really outside of politics, what are we to make of Levinas' claims that justice (involving concern for all other others, consciousness, comparison, coexistence, thematization etc.) "is shown from the first" in the ethical relation (1981, 159) and that "there is a question of the said and being only because saying or responsibility require justice" (1981, 45)? Justice is always called for in the ethical relation because, according to Levinas, conscious judgment, perception and comparison are there from the first in that the other who inspires and accuses me is in relation to a "third party", to other others to whom they are responsible and who treat me, alongside the other I face, as someone to be concerned about and welcomed (Levinas 1981, 161).[6] The here I am one-for-the-other always also refers to other social beings and so is mediated by the political, by the organization of society for the improvement of the human survival and so by the need for reflection, comparison,  and conscious judgment.

While Levinas thus acknowledges that the inaugural moment of sociality is perhaps inseparable from politics and justice he also depersonalises politics by assuming it operates only through grand themes and through conscious decisions and judgments. He does not seem to grant that the political is personal and that perhaps politics is also inseparable from sensibility, from the pre-reflective dispersed openness to the other by whose grace I am. That politics, the ontico-ontological, the cultural, is there from the first in the ethical relation, saturating sensibility, is no better demonstrated in what is arguably the pivotal moment of Disgrace (92-98).

Here I am. You, strangers, enter my home, touch my skin, open my soul. Through and beyond the blackness of your face there is the expression of a different South Africa, an alterity that would be lost in (English) words. Here I am but only through broken English, through the grace of that alterity and its one-for-the-other, through the sensibility that inspires the gift of (my) land, of my (white) way of life and of my own skin. But with that grace I feel only your hatred. So personal yet so little to do with me. Trapped, held down, your weight smothers. Something dies, is murdered, "leaving the body behind covered in blood" (Coetzee, 158). Here I am, Lucy, but am I unconditionally for these strangers? Here I am, face blank,  carrying the responsibility for the history of white colonialism in the form of a child. Raped by "debt collectors", by men who "do rape" (158), not out of evil, but in the service of an exchange system which, while put in place by the colonisers, now works toward a redistribution of goods, a taking back, a giving back, of "cars, shoes; women too" (98). That, says Lucy, is the price for staying on. And in order to stay on her land in post apartheid South Africa she will withhold judgment of her rapists and she will "marry" Petrus in exchange for his protection.

Without denying that sensibility rather than words, conscious judgment or knowledge expresses the one-for-the-other of the ethical relation, and without denying that this sociality of non-indifference to difference is inspired by alterity that is not absorbed within it, at no point can it be said that the relation to the other is free from perception of the other, from history, or from the culturally bound meaning these imply. Nor is the grace of the other pure or without those cultural ornaments that inform the other's sensibility, their actions, judgments and perceptions as well as my perception of them. The grace of the other is the surplus that breaks through his/her form, but only "in the midst of the production of its form" (Levinas 1987, 96). That is, the other's irreducible difference only breaks through in the midst of the production of form through words, acts perceptions and their meanings. Lucy's other's, whether strangers or neighbours, are never without that cultural production that their alterity breaks through. Hence Lucy's relations to these others is never without problems; never without the political and ontological; never without the history of colonialism that can turn sensibility into hate, decolonisation into taking back, and grace into disgrace; and never without sexual difference (after all, these strangers did not rape David who was there for the taking). Taking or giving, passivity or activity, disgrace or grace: whatever Levinas says, the limit between the two, between politics and ethics, is never pure.[7]

If justice is called for from the first in the sensibility of the ethical relation this is because other others are there from the first, not by virtue of conscious judgment and comparison with reference to themes for the just organisation of society (to which Levinas reduces justice and politics), but in the expressivity of the other person's whole sensible being, that is in the ontological expression of cultural-political-historical worlds that is inseparable from the non-indifference to difference of sensibility. What I am suggesting here is that the here I am one-for-the-other is never unconditional and that there is no moment of affective dispersed subjectivity exhibiting rapport with the other that lies outside of ontology, politics or culture. This however, is not to suggest that alterity is doomed to absorption within existing meanings held by the bodies and positions that dominate our cultures. On the contrary, there is a way to understand intersubjectivity in terms of sensibility saturated with politics and cultural meanings without abandoning Levinas' important insight that it is by the grace of the other's irreducible difference that here I am for the other.

Merleau-Ponty, for example, like Levinas, suggests that subjectivity as sensibility (corporeal affectivity open to a world) is animated by the other but, unlike Levinas, this sensibility is inseparable from perception, action and the cultural meanings these carry.[8] Further, for Meleau-Ponty, perception, judgment, and action, understood as sensibility, are not reducible to reflexive consciousness. Animated by the other, perception (sensibility, subjectivity) is corporeal and pre-reflective and happens without choice, decision or thought. To the extent that perception subsumes the world and the other under familiar terms that may override the difference this is the effect of corporeal habit and an accompanying sedimentation of culturally informed meaning, the kind of recalcitrance that David Laurie displays so well to the detriment of those around him. But because perception as sensibility is opened by and to the body of the other, meaning, and the culture it supports, is always, ambiguous, indeterminate, and open to transformation within the perception act or gesture. As Merleau-Ponty puts it:

If the other person is really another, at a certain stage I must be surprised, disorientated. If we are to meet not just through what we have in common but in what is different between us [this] presupposes a transformation of myself and of the other as well … (Merleau-Ponty 1973, 142)

He also suggests in the same passage that, in this transformation of meaning and being in response to the other's difference, "our differences can no longer be opaque qualities. They must become meaning" if the other's difference that surprises, disorientates and so animates perception is not to be dismissed as non-sense. The issue is to what extent this becoming meaning through the intercorporeal basis of perception is a totalizing gesture that subsumes the grace of the other under the social meanings that inhabit the bodies which dominate our culture. One thread of Merleau-Ponty's thinking here suggests that in order for the other's difference to animate and transform perception without being absorbed in the process then it is those dominant meanings that must give way: the animation of perception and transformation of meaning by the grace of the other rests on allowing oneself to "be lead by the flow" of the other's discourse, "especially at the moment he withdraws from us and threatens to fall into non-sense," so that what does not fall so easily under familiar terms is capable of transforming us into the other and opening "us to another meaning" (1973, 143). While Merleau-Ponty also assumes, at least in this paper, a kind of communion between different bodies as an ideal endpoint to this intercorporeal relation, it is still the other's difference that inspires that attempt at communion and this difference cannot be absorbed in the process. This disturbing "spontaneous" operation of speech (what Levinas might call the 'saying' of language), "the first 'human' signification … surpasses our common prehistory eventhough prolonging its movement" (1973, 141); this spontaneous power (which is "not a god") "pulls significations from us", "destroys the generality of the species and brings [man] to admit others into his deepest singularity" (1973, 146).

            Admitting others into her deepest singularity, being "led by the flow" of the other's discourse, is what characterises the generosity of Lucy's sensibility, at least in relation to Petrus. But her giving, animated by cultural difference, and the transformations of meaning, being and culture it effects is not and could never be unconditional. She will always be to a certain extent in disgrace. Not because she withholds herself in a moment of conscious judgment in deference to a grand politics, but because, before this, her sensibility is inseparable from perceptions and judgments which carry the history of her culture and to some extent prolong its movement and assumptions of commonness with others. At the same time however, her giving indicates a sensitivity to the grace of the other, allowing the disorientation effected by this trace of alterity to surpass any assumed common prehistory and so to transform meaning, her being and culture in the interests of decolonisation. Admitting that sensibility, non-indifference to difference, is political and therefore that the political is personal is to admit, along with Levinas, that there is the risk of the disgrace of absorbing the other's difference in every perception, act, gesture and word directed toward and about the other. But admitting that the political is personal and inseparable from sensibility also allows that, while the here I am one-for-the-other is never unconditional and that sincerity is impossible, some perceptions, acts, gestures and words are more open to otherness than others. It would admit that Lucy's politics of difference is more constructive and less disgraceful than her father's or her rapists.

            But in case we are tempted to join the panel of self-righteous, self-serving, and largely indifferent academics who lord over David's disgrace, admitting that the political is personal and inseparable from sensibility is also to allow that even the most recalcitrant, self-serving and indifferent among us are open to the grace of the other. That David is more open to alterity and less indifferent to difference at the end of his journey than he was at the beginning is not manifest in increased self-awareness or understanding about the politics and ethics of difference. While Lucy's rape reminds him of his treatment of Melanie, making this connection does not set him off onto a path of enlightenment about the meaning of disgrace. It leaves him indifferent and in despair, ashamed of Lucy's shame and ashamed of his own inability to protect her. Nor does the apology he offers Melanie's parents shortly after indicate he has more of a clue about the grace of the other than he did before. Rather, that David is opened through Lucy to the teaching of the other is felt beyond his words, explicit thoughts and musings about the events and people around him. That he is being "led by the flow" of the other's discourse is manifest at the level of sensibility and in the least heroic or erotic places: in his increased affinity with and respect for Bev and her work with broken and dying animals, the dregs of Africa that noone wants; in his increased compassion for those animals, especially the dogs, and in his work in honouring their corpses; in his inability to write his operatic eulogy to Byron, finding increasingly less inspiration in Byron's romanticism than in the humiliation of Teresa, his discarded mistress. Here I am. David, not gathering myself as was my intention but "losing [myself] day by day" (Coetzee 121). Here I am opened by and for the other, "giving [myself] to the world" in the "service of dead dogs" (146).

            It is and the level of sensibility then, of non-indifference to difference rather than understanding with reference to political ideals, that David, inspired by the sensibilities of the women in his life, is opened to the grace of the other. But this here I am one-for-the-other is not outside of acts, gestures or deeds and the cultural meanings and politics this implies. His living for the other is a politics of species, sexual and cultural difference. It is sobering to note however, that David's most generous and least self-serving act, the last and perhaps most moving in the book, is tinged necessarily with disgrace. Despite a growing and deep affection for an unnamed and crippled dog in his care, David, recognising that the dog's "period of grace is almost over" (215), gives him up to death. This is hardly a big moment in South African politics nor a giant step forward for cultural or sexual difference. And it could be read as a comment on the hopelessness and impossibility of opening South Africa or even David to a prosperous life at a time of decolonisation. However, I think it is less this than a comment on the paradox of subjectivity inspired by the grace of the other and on the aporetic structure of a politics of difference. Recognising that subjectivity as sensibility inspired by the grace of the other is inseparable from the act, from politics and so from the disgrace of doing damage to difference is to acknowledge just how hard it is to be good in difficult times.

 

© Rosalyn Diprose

School of Philosophy

University of New South Wales

Sydney. Australia. 2052

 

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Sandford, Stella. 1998. "Writing as a man: Levinas and the phenomenology of eros", Radical Philosophy 87: 6-17.

Vasseleu, Cathryn. 1998. Textures of light: Vision and touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, London and New York: Routledge.

Ziarek, Ewa. Forthcoming. "The Ethical passions of Emmanuel Levinas", in Feminist interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas, Tina Chanter (ed.)