Sweet Fooling: Ethical Humor in King Lear and Levinas

Extract

In recent years, scholars have increasingly put the works of William Shakespeare in dialogue with the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Currently, a search for “Levinas” and “Shakespeare” on Google Scholar returns about 16,600 results.¹ The earliest examples of such work appeared at the start of the twenty-first century, which means that the philosopher himself, who died in 1995, did not live to see the Levinasian turn in Shakespeare studies.² Nevertheless, Levinas did much to lead us in this direction. In interviews and essays, Levinas named Shakespeare as one of his primary influences and identified the playwright as one whose art he admired.³ In his early work Time and the Other (1948), Levinas provocatively proposed that “the whole of philosophy is only a meditation of Shakespeare”; and in his great work Otherwise Than Being (1974), he alluded to both Macbeth and Hamlet on the first page.⁴ Indeed, Levinas’s collected works contain more references to Shakespeare than to any other author, save Dostoyevsky. The majority of references are to Hamlet and Macbeth, but contemporary critics working in the vein of Levinas have tended to favor King Lear. No Shakespeare play has been subjected to Levinasian analysis more fully or more frequently.⁵ This critical proclivity is not unwarranted, for Shakespeare’s tragic play and Levinas’s ethical writings tell the same basic story—that of the egoist who heedlessly pursues his own interests until he is called into question by traumatizing encounters with others.