HOW CAN A TRICKSTER BE MY FRIEND?

OR THE UNEXPECTED FACE OF THE OTHER

 

SORANA CORNEANU*

Certes, c’est un sujet merveilleusement vain, divers et ondoyant, que l’homme. Il est malaisé d’y fonder jugement constant et uniforme.

(Montaigne, Essais, I, i, 41)

 

Introduction

What I propose in this paper is an exercise in reading that stems from a recognition of the impact of the Levinasian doctrine of the Other on today’s thought, as well as from a puzzlement as to this doctrine’s area of applicability. The question of the Other no longer needs advertising: among the multiplying range of contemporary dilemmas, this is one that does not fail to keep the front page, as one of the fulcrums of our modern heritage. Levinas has formulated a radical premise: he insists on our recognising the irreducible fact of the person-in-front-of-us being an other, different from us, a fact which we can never wonder at enough.[1] Even before dealing with cultural others (be they premised in terms of nationality, ethnicity, race, or gender), the extraordinary event of meeting someone different from me (even if the same in all the above respects) is bound to happen with every step I take down my street (and even within my very home). This is something I believe no one can dispute. And such awareness of a ne plus ultra of difference is able to question the Western “myth of the self-same” and introduce the grand ethical themes of responsibility and hospitality.

The exercise in reading I propose is an inquiry into the way texts dramatise the encounter with the Other and at the same time an attempt to recognise the way reading grids operate in their (our) own encounter with texts. I first discuss a text (a film) that looks as a perfect object for a Levinasian interpretation and then turn to two other texts (a film and a novel) that seem to question not only the possibility of such an interpretation, but also some of the very premises of it. I thus proceed from a recognition of the important Levinasian problematic (and its Derridean echoes, which I introduce briefly in the opening section) only to turn to a re-consideration of it in light of a certain image of the Other that is capable of puzzling a Levinasian reading intention. The question from which the puzzlement starts is, how can the Levinasian model of the Other account for a figure that seems to resist an ethics of hospitality and responsibility: a figure I call “the other as impostor”.

The Levinasian Other

The problem with both ontology and phenomenology, says Lévinas[2], is that they always reduce the other to the data of the same, thus favouring either the unity of being or the unity of consciousness. Theoretical thinking (theoria) is a form of violence, since it is incapable of respecting the other in its being and meaning. What it does, through the conjoined actions of light and power[3], is to do away with the other, to ignore it, i.e. to know, identify and assimilate the other. The same / the subject takes the other simply as an object of representation and thus ranges it within the totalising economy of its own, self-same, categories. The other is thus neutralised. The hegemony of the neuter corroborates the ontological and political spheres, in a logic of power which equates being and place, arhe and agora, under the sign of the Law – nomos and logos – with the eventual tracing of an ethos (or: objective morality) able to accommodate (i.e. neutralise) both selves and others.[4]

Yet prior to any ontology, Lévinas claims, there is the relation with the other (Autrui) as interlocutor, where the logos is primarily and fundamentally a logos for the other – a metaphysics which is essentially an ethics:

There is a form of truth that is totally alien to me, that I do not discover within myself, but that calls on me from beyond me and it requires me to leave the realms of the known and the same in order to settle in a land that is under its rule.[5]

The knower’s experiential adventure starts with the “primary fact of the irruption of the other”:

And this other is not a threat to be reduced or an object that I give myself to know in my capacity as knowing subject, but that which constitutes me as an ethical being: in my originary encounter I discover my responsibility for the existence of the other, a responsibility that will lie at the root of all my subsequent ethical decisions. Knowledge and its operations are subordinated to this initial ethical moment, for the responsibility that I then experience is the very ground of my response-ability, that is, my capacity to communicate with the others and with myself in non-coercive ways.[6]

The other, therefore, must be thought as coming from a radical, non-conceptual, and thus non-spatial, exteriority, a paradoxical place/non-place that cannot be comprised within any totality. The other must remain infinitely other, invisible and inaccessible, the only “relation” which makes possible the encounter. The encounter is neither representation nor conceptual reduction to the same. It is the only way out, the only adventure outside the self towards the unpredictably-other. The encounter is the mode of a desire-respect for the other as other, which remains desire, in a movement which is at the same time one of renunciation. Desire does neither consume nor consummate the other and does not hope to “come back” within the horizon of the same. In opening up “une eschatologie qui n’attend rien”, it performs a rupture of the Economy and of the Odyssey[7] as the very impossibility of return[8]. The encounter as separation is the only possible opening of time, beyond history as economy, a pure future which is present at the heart of experience. In her dialogue “on hospitality” with Jacques Derrida, Anne Dufourmantelle notes, significantly, that the Hebrew for “to invite” translates as “making time” (“fabriquer du temps”)[9].

The locus of the encounter, for Lévinas, is the face (eye-sight and word at the same time), which preserves the distance and interrupts totality. The face launches the absolute question, the non-theoretic interrogation, addressed to a liberty (une liberté), and thus opens the free capability of response. The true encounter of the face preserves the ethical distance and thus preserves the other as other. Language and speaking cannot be about the other, which would be to thematise it and reduce it to object/concept, but only to the other, who should be reached as inaccessible and invisible. The paradox of the non-spatial distance/encounter is joined by the paradox of visibility, which Derrida explores:

Il faut que les catégories manquent pour qu’autrui ne soit pas manqué; mais pour qu’autrui ne soit pas manqué, il faut qu’il se présente comme absence et apparaisse comme non-phénoménalité.[10]

Let me note, as a corollary to the whole discussion, that such paradoxical, open dialectics of presence and absence, of the seen and the unseen, or of the phenomenal and the noumenal will easily translate into a re-thinking of theological matters, as seems to be the ultimate reach of Derrida’s thought.[11]

The Other à la Lévinas

My first reading takes as its text a film (K-Pax, by Ian Softley, 2001) that seems to call for a Levinasian perspective. Here is, then, an interpretation quasi à clef.

A mysterious man who calls himself Prot (Kevin Spacey) appears one day in a New York railway station, as if coming from nowhere, and, as it were, accompanied by a ray of powerful yet gentle light. The only one who notices him at the moment of his coming is a handicapped black beggar, a quite histrionic and anomic figure: the first contact is a mute dialogue between two “strangers”. Prot is a man with slow, composed gestures, walking as if nothing pressed or could ever press him, smiling as if nothing could afflict him, observing the others in a natural, detached yet affectionately interested way. He has an endearing and ingenuous bent of the head when addressing people or watching things, and always wears a pair of dark glasses. He cannot endure too much light, and that because he comes from the planet K-Pax, in the Lyra Galaxy, where the usual light coming from the two suns is dimmer than sun light on Planet Earth. It so happens that while in the railway station, he offers to help a woman who has been robbed and molested, when two police officers come and start interrogating him. He of course cannot present any ID and the answer he gives when inquired about his name and address edifies the police officers: they take him straight to a psychiatric hospital.

A difficult case, on whom medicine doesn’t work, he is assigned to the best therapist they have (Jeff Bridges). From now on a number of conflicting data accumulate which will culminate in indeterminacy: there is perplexing evidence that Prot might actually be coming from this planet K-Pax, about which he can easily deliver information which the best astronomers have only started to glimpse at; it may be that he can really travel faster than light, since he disappears for two days from the precincts of the inexpugnable hospital. Yet there is also only too clear evidence (for which the hospital will naturally opt in the long run) that he is a human (Robert Protwel) severely deranged as a consequence of a terribly painful trauma suffered several years ago, when his wife and daughter were slaughtered in his house.

The ending is equally uncertain: Prot announces that he will go back to K-Pax on a certain day at a certain hour, when he also promises to take one of his fellow patients (a woman) with him. In an unnatural flashing of light he does seem to take off at that particular hour of that particular day. Yet the body of the man who called himself Prot is found inert under the bed, and it will remain so, even if alive. The woman, though, actually disappears without a trace.

The ambiguity of the character, his undecidable origin and “nature”, is itself the premise for a movement of interrogation that is bound to understand itself and remain such, without begging for answers. His relationships with the therapist and the patients, and with the social structures he enters remain suspended in a questioning (or, perhaps, to use the Shakespearean word, questionable) shape.

The Therapist’s curing efforts in K-Pax are an attempt at making Prot acknowledge that he is a man with a trauma, that his existential situation can be accounted for within the institutionalised economy of medical psychiatric knowledge. The very form of the therapy sessions, measured out by time limits and the usual terms of medical rhetoric, speaks of a form of encounter that is orchestrated, performed, one could say rehearsed, in keeping with the accepted professional norms of address, which serve the idea of normality/sanity rather than the person speaking. The face-to-face of therapy is only an iterated performance. Yet Prot’s presence, which tries neither to comply to, nor denegate, the therapist’s attempts, is able to gradually open an excessive space within the formalised structure of the therapy scheme, where the therapist himself feels questioned and called upon, as if invited, graciously, to open up and give himself, not to the other, but to the act of giving itself. “I feel that somehow he chose me,” the therapist muses. A more genuine face-to-face, one that preserves the distance while making possible the approach, is thus mapped out within the strict, neutre, impersonal cartography of the institutionalised face-to-face.

The therapist’s initial concern/obsession is to find out Prot’s “real” name – what he wants is to identify him, to assign him to a recognisable, visible place within the social structure, i.e. to acquire a safe representation of him. Towards the end, though, he seems to silently accept Prot’s proposal – one which closes off the obsessive search of identification while opening the indeterminate zone of mutually supporting incongruous options: “I am prepared to accept the possibility that I am Robert Protwel if you are prepared to accept the possibility that I am from K-Pax.”

Visually, the film comments on their relationship in at least two significant instances. A first “contact” of the two is performed through the reflecting medium of a windowpane separating the office quarters inside the hospital. The therapist catches a glimpse of Prot who is in the other room, arrested by the air of strangeness that surrounds him; while he adjusts his position in order to have a better look at him, the glass reflections of the therapist’s face and of Prot’s face as visible through the glass come to overlap. As if contact must preserve distance, as if contact were only possible if it preserved distance. Secondly, Prot’s dark glasses themselves function as reflecting surfaces and constitute a visual metaphoric comment on the notion of light and seeing. When the light is strong (for him), Prot needs to wear his glasses, in whose reflecting darkness the therapist will only contemplate his own image. As if, where there is too much light (the light of evidence and theory), the only thing you were able to see in the “eyes” of the other would be yourself. As if “visibility” were only a function of obscurity, as indicated by Prot’s relief when the therapist decides to plunge his room in a dimmer light, so that Prot can finally take off his glasses – when the therapy session becomes a friendly encounter, when the hospital opens an (irregular) space of hospitality.

Within this Levinasian/Derridean reading grid, therefore, Prot is a figure of the other/stranger – allogenous to the self yet a member of its “family”, part of the territory of familiarity while also different: indeed, the right inhabitant of distance as defined by the movement of giving, of questioning and responding. An intruder into the space of the same, he is also a liberator of it, in the sense that his coming only becomes possible if a question and a calling is addressed from the place of the self, which is by this very gesture put in question and dis-located out of it-self.

 

The Other as Impostor

The second movement of my inquiry stars from the readerly experience of an encounter with Others who will not lend themselves so easily to charitable dialogue, whose presence is far from an epiphanic opening of horizons, who will baffle any attempt of a subject eager to transcend itself through the offering of friendship and trust. I bring therefore into discussion two texts that construct a figure of the Other whose gift is only a gift of trickery.

As it happens, one character who would qualify for the position of the stranger coming from the non-space of exteriority and who would, up to a point, seem to inhabit the same category with Prot, is impersonated by the same Kevin Spacey in Brian Singer’s 1995 film, The Usual Suspects. Roger “Verbal” Kint is a man who tells a story of extraordinary events and unbearable mysteries as dialogue partner for U.S. Customs Agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri), the man in charge with investigating a crime in which Kint seems to have played an important, if secondary, role. Everything starts with an explosion that rocks a boat moored at the San Pedro docks and believed to hold a cache of cocaine worth $91 million, and destroys everything on it and most of the craft. There are only two survivors: a Hungarian gangster, who lies disfigured in a hospital emergency room, and Kint, a cripple con-man from New York, whom we see interrogated in the police station. Here, Kint recounts a tale of five criminals who banded together in New York for one job and who became the “usual suspects” in police line-ups. These five criminals, of whom Kint is one, appear as protagonists of the events on the boat, though not as perpetrators, but as pawns dragged into a criminal game that was actually meant to cover the traces of one arch-criminal, whose name hovers menacingly over every step of the action: Kayser Soze is the one who choreographs the whole affair (through his attorney, Kobayashi) yet never shows his face. 

Kint’s role, therefore, is to reconstruct and interpret for Kujan the course of events: he does so willingly, although he has no legal reason to co-operate, as he has been granted full immunity as sole survivor capable of examination. The revelation that seems to impose itself from Kint’s account is that the mysterious Kayser Soze was no other than Dean Keaton, the most reluctant of the five criminals, who seemed to choose a clean life as respectable businessman but finally accepted Kint’s plan for the heist (which would have assured that no killing would be involved). The whole tale Kint develops in his give-and-take with Kujan is thus an awed search for the true identity of Kayser Soze, the man behind the mask.

Kint invites, in some respects, a parallel with Prot (and the fact that the two characters are played by the same actor makes it the more appealing). Just like Prot, Kint comes almost from another planet – the Mafia of crime – and yet appears as a rather humble witness to events. Also, both characters are protagonists of an investigation scenario: Prot is examined by the psychiatrist, Kint by the police officer, and what they have to say are facts hardly classifiable for either instance. An air of improbability surrounds both. But as to the identity of the characters themselves, while Prot maintains his undecidability all through, Kint only becomes problematic at the end, by means of a spectacular reversal.

Once Kujan seems to rest partly satisfied with the revelation of Kayser Soze’s identity as Keaton, Kint is free to go; musing now in his office on the whole story, Kujan glimpses at the panel with police clippings that stood behind him and therefore facing Kint during the interrogation. He realises that the main names of people and places figuring in Kint’s story were simply taken over from the clippings and thus that the whole story of criminals and mysteries so painfully detailed and cautiously interpreted by Kint was a mere invention. Naturally he panics and runs after Kint, who is nowhere to be found. And we see Kint walking away, relaxing his strained leg and arm into normal movement and dropping off the tortured honest face we knew: Kobayashi is waiting for him in a car and the two drive off leaving behind a furiously perplexed Kujan. Kint is (probably) the real Kayser Soze, and anyway an extraordinarily gifted speaker (as his nickname, “Verbal”, suggests) and a complete conniver.

The question that I derive from Kint’s story is one that turns Prot’s coin on the other side: how does one deal with the other, when the other is an impostor? How should one accommodate the notions of friendship and trust, or the injunction for the subject to receive its “law” from the other, in a situation where the subject only finds out that he has been left to play the fool? Both Prot and Kint disappear after their encounters with the “investigators”; and if we should take the figure of the investigator as the now ill-famed image of the subject (seeking to define, etc. the other), how large is the family that would accept as equal members both the investigator who is left dreaming of friendship and the investigator who is left prostrated, biting his fists with frustration?

Before I attempt a discussion of these questions, I will introduce another story of frustration, which might help identifying several important points. But let me note, already, that the dilemma does not arise from the difficulty of a situation in which the other appears as a criminal who injures the subject (where there is still room for forgiveness and for the – uneasy, but real – possibility of brotherhood), but from a situation in which the other plays the trickster: in other words, what seems problematic for a Levinasian view is not a variant of an ethical situation, but a specific interpretative situation.

My third text is a contemporary novel (Corpsing, 2000) by a British young writer (Toby Litt), which has been acclaimed as a first-rate thriller. It is, again, a story of an investigation, carried out by the protagonist, Conrad, who searches into the backstage of a murder that was supposed to terminate both him and his ex-girlfriend, soap actress Lilian Irish (Lily), but only managed to kill her and not him. The investigation carries us through a number of episodes and finally ends with the destabilising news that the author of the whole affair, the one who arranged for the shooting was none other than Lily herself, who thus sought to take revenge on Conrad (even at the price of her own death) for having been such a bastard as to make her pregnant – a situation which seems to mar her chances with her new lover, Alun. Yet we only find out about this incredible piece of cruelty born of fickleness at the end; when the novel starts, we only know that Lily’s will to meet Conrad on the day of the shooting is a mystery, as is the only word she utters before being shot (“Bastard!”), and that, after finding out about her pregnancy (which she had planned to interrupt), Conrad feels an enormous trick has been played on him – a feeling that will grow through the novel and ring the final note.

For fifteen minutes or so, it was as if Lily were alive again – capable of new and surprising actions.

(In a way, the feeling I discovered that afternoon in Lily’s flat has never quite left me. Even after coming to what I think and hope is The End, I cannot quite believe that Lily has no more ways of hurting me. This whole experience has almost made me disbelieve in death – or what you might call personal extinction. Lily’s actions in life have come upon me – months after the cease of her pulse – as freshly and abruptly as any moment of living impulse and anger. This so-called person seems as capable as anyone alive of vindictiveness and contempt. She retains her cruel sense of actorly timing – the inopportune moment is always when she chooses once again to knock me sideways. It is almost as if, I feel, her nervous system still operates. If I pain her, she flinches – then she pains me back.) (p. 71)

For Conrad, the process of inquiry and discovery reveals an image of his lover that radically re-interprets whatever he knew of her and of himself. It is not only the love he felt that is frustrated, but the whole interpretative mechanism by means of which he used to make sense of his life, a life in which Lily (his other) was the focus of attention. And the powerful suggestion of the text is that the same Lily, although dead, remains more painfully alive than anyone by this capacity of acting as (crafty) partner in a shared experience that is now, however, only played out at the level of re-interpretation.

The scenarios in The Usual Suspects and Corpsing are largely similar in the sense that they both feature “investigators” who are taken in up to a point by a particular face of events, only to be fiercely given the lie and plunged into an abyss of interpretative frustration by their “interlocutors”. Also, both stories hinge on a “moment of revelation” that, far from being an epiphany, only works to re-open the “case” in retrospect, and discover a different face of events, which fails even to be edifying, as the persistent feeling of the tricked is one of incommensurable defeat.

I have thus attempted to place side by side two sorts of reading: one “enchanted” with Levinasian premises, the other “disenchanted” and sensible to limit cases, or to textual constructions of the “other as impostor” (lived experience might prove a rich source in this respect as well; I have nevertheless chosen to discuss only artistic productions because of the heightening of experience they are able to perform – one reason why they usually serve as models for an inquiry that extends beyond the border of art into life itself.) The latter examples will serve as cue for my final discussion in which I attempt to build on the questions I have already raised.

Hosts and ghosts

The need to conceive the relation self-other in a way that breaks with a tradition of self-centred thought (or with what has been constructed as such) has animated much critical debate, most of which has developed in the wake of, or in dialogue with, Lévinas’ ode to the other. In most accounts, the question is addressed from strong philosophical positions.

In an attempt to uncover the healthy potentialities inherent to the idea of subject, Renaut proposes a “non-metaphysical humanism” that ultimately rests on the Kantian “autonomy of the subject”, seen as the subject that, in giving itself the law, will necessarily transcend individuality as self-identity and open up to the alterity of human kind. At stake here is the replacement of the metaphysical foundation with the idea of a “break within immanence”: no longer self-geared, subjectivity will only be able to reach itself if it starts from an opening towards its exterioriy or alterity. The defining feature of the subject will no longer be its intentionality, but, in Levinas’ terms, responsibility, although the moral position of the subject is still to be conceived as autonomy (in Kantian terms, and in opposition to Levinas.)[12]

The question of the autonomy of the self and the possibilities of its rescue from the attack on the metaphysical tradition is also Ricœur’s concern. He defines this autonomy as intimately linked with the “solicitude for our fellow beings” and with “justice towards every man”. Ricœur upholds the idea of this intimacy with his “hermeneutics of the self” which describes two domains of identity, which coexist and work together: the idem identity, which is a figure of one’s permanence through time, and the ipse identity, which acknowledges change through time and brings into play both the relation idem-ipse (mêmeté-ipséité) and the dialectics of self and other (ipséité-altérité).[13]

Ricoeur’s development brings in important elements. He envisages the self-other relation as primarily a communicative situation, a dialogic encounter (in which there is no one source) that rests on language, the temporality of the self and on the interchange of roles.[14] All three elements elaborate and at the same time modify significantly Levinas’ image of the “mastery of the Other”. The recognition of the role of language in the dialogue introduces a dimension of narrativity and thus of narrated temporality that lends a different accent to the self-other relation than Levinas’ insistence on the face, the sight or the caress. It also makes room for the dramatic image of selves as roles or, as I would put it, as protagonists of fabricated stories giving the cue to one another. Venn argues in similar terms:

Our inscription in language, and the narrative character of identity, instantiates the inter-subjective ground of subjectivity; it signals the primacy of the social in the process of the constitution of subjects.[15]

Narrativity is also the major premise for Taylor’s elaboration of a “moral ontology” in which it is important to understand that in order for us to make sense of ourselves, it is essential that “we grasp our lives in a narrative”[16] – an effort that necessarily exists in a “space of questions” in which identity formulates itself by formulating (provisional) answers to questions engendered by existence in a social space:

My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose, i.e. the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.[17]

I take this dimension of the narrativity/temporality of the self, which seems to me more manageable epistemologically than the idea of an epiphanic opening of time beyond time that the encounter with the face of the other would provide – I take it, therefore, to stand as a serious challenge to the Levinasian primacy of an unconditional ethics, i.e. of a “receiving”, “hospitable” movement prior to, and dismissive of, the cognitive effort. Venn summarises this ethical view:

After all, the obligation to listen to the narrative of the other is not motivated by epistemological or cognitive interests, but by an unconditional ethics, or by a will, or by a love.[18]

On the contrary, I would suggest, the narratives of the other, even if received by a befriending self who renounces the position of theoretical authority, are bound to trigger a cognitive, interpretative movement (which need not be monologic, but defines any encounter with the other in terms of a quest for meaning).

If the way the other approaches me and the way I approach the other is through a construction and development of narratives, the response and the dialogue can only proceed by a work of sense-making on either side, by mutual adjustment and interrogation, and a willingness to accept that stories may be modified all the time along the way. (My examples of the impostor others are actually extreme cases of stories made and unmade by skilful actors who seduce their “interrogators” into accepting one version and then defeat them by throwing the other version in their face. More regular encounters need not be so dramatic, but the fact that there must be awareness of the interpretative game remains.) Moreover, this understanding of encounter as an exchange of narratives among “storied selves” allows for a recognition of the position of the subject, which can be referential without being totalitarian: there can be an ethical carving of a space from which and to which questions are addressed, which does not need to posit any non-space or irreducible distance for the other. Merleau-Ponty argued for the need to understand together the self’s subjectivity and its transcendence towards its others, as two facets of the fundamental fact of the self’s being situated and involved in a physical and social world. My insertion in the world is also the guarantee of my freedom, understood as the power to be the subject of my experiences – which are at once different from me and recognised as my own.

The question is, always, to know how I can be open to the phenomena that transcend me and which, nevertheless, only exist in so far as I take them within me and live them – how the presence (Urpräsenz) that defines me and conditions any other presence is at the same time a de-presentation (Entgegenwartigung) which throws me outside myself.[19]

After all, I remain myself even as I wonder that there is such a thing as an Other. And I am free to receive even as I try to understand.

I cannot dispute the force of Levinas’ image of the other as host and the importance of a modern re-thinking of the ethical situation of the encounter with the Other. But I suggest that the situated relation with the Other is one that accumulates narrative episodes in a temporal progression which calls for a work of understanding and is at any time capable of requiring a retracing of steps or a reinterpretation that rearranges the whole story.

Conrad’s final words to a now missing Lily describe his detective quest as a chase after an elusive figure that hurts by refusing to make sense: as he puts it, he ran after a ghost:

As far as I can see, you’re a completely different person to the one I thought I knew. Almost, anyway. And even her, I didn’t know very well. That’s partly because you spent most of the time we were together lying to me and partly because I’ve spent most of time since then lying to myself. I think I knew. Really, in most ways, I think I knew the whole thing. But there I was, just going on with it – letting you work put your revenge on me, through me. I feel like I’ve been chasing – I don’t know what I feel like I’ve been chasing. A ghost, I suppose.

At work here, in this limit situation of the other as impostor, is a process of remembrance that is a recuperation of a different story in the form of a differently arranged puzzle – a recuperation that is far from appeasing: instead, it leaves behind the uncomfortable taste of fraud. The work of memory is, in Ricœur’s account, one that is able to regulate the dialectic of binding and unbinding – a binding to the events of the past, and the unbinding by forgiveness.[20] Again, an account does not apply to the victims of meaning frauds. Kint or Lily cannot be forgiven, since it is not so much their actions that do violence, as their trickstery in fooling their others. Kujan or Conrad do not need so much to forgive, as to understand; what they need to escape is not so much the memory of the facts, as the trap of the interpretation of the facts: or, the riddle.

I will conclude by noticing what my own exercise in interpretation has led to. I started with one reading grid and offered an interpretation of the other consistent with the premises of that grid and then I tried to question some of these premises by introducing a different grid which could more easily accommodate a specific figure of the same other. The important thing to be acknowledged is that the cue for these distinct perspectives came from the texts themselves, which have their own powerful strategies of emploting their themes. And an investigation of such strategies can open up the complex horizon of a life problematic that seems always to exceed this or that doctrine.

 

REFERENCES

 

 

DE CERTEAU, M., Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

DERRIDA, J., L’Écriture et la différence, ch. “Violence et métaphysique. Essai sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Lévinas”, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1967.

DERRIDA, J., De l’hospitalité, Paris, Calmann-Levy, 1997.

IONESCU, C.M., Cercul lui Hermes, Bucureşti, Univers Enciclopedic, 1998.

LEVINAS, E., Totalitate şi infinit. Eseu despre exterioritate, tr. M. Lazurca, Iaşi, Polirom, 1999.

LEVINAS, E., “Problema alterităţii”, in dialogue with François Poirié, in Secolul XXI. Alteritate, no. 1-7/2002.

MARION, J.-L., L’Idole et la distance, Paris, Flammarion, 1977.

MERLEAU-PONTY, M., “Celălalt şi lumea umană”, in Secolul XXI. Alteritate, no. 1-7/2002.

RENAUT, A., Era individului. Contribuţie la o istorie a subiectivităţii, tr. C. Ciubotaru, Iaşi, Institutul European, 1998.

RICŒUR, P., Soi-même comme un autre, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1990.

RICŒUR, P., Memoria, istoria, uitarea, tr. I. & M. Gyurcsik, Timişoara, Amarcord, 2001.

TAYLOR,C., Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1989.

VENN, C., Occidentalism. Modernity and Subjectivity, London, Thousand Oaks, New Dehli, Sage Publications, 2000.