Possessing the Other’s Future- To Die and To Be

8/7/2019 Possessing the Others Future- To Die and To Be

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Thomas Wendt

Possessing the Others Future: To Die and To Be

How can the event that cannot be grasped still happen to me? What can theothers relationship with a being, and existent, be? How can the existent exist as

mortal and nonetheless persevere in its personality, preserve its conquest overthe anonymous there is, the subjects mastery, the conquest of its subjectivity?

How can a being enter into relation with the other without allowing its very self tobe crushed by the other? (Levinas, Time and the Other, 76)

Such questions represent one of the essential inquiries of Levinass project: how does one

retain subjectivity in the face of the other who continually threatens to destroy it? In this ethical

situation, the subject must defend against its own death while asserting its influence on the

otherthat is, to maintain the sense of purpose and progression that, according to Levinas,

defines the subject as such, but also, in an extreme attempt at mastery, attempt to possess the

other. One must maintain the fine balance between self-sustainment and mastery of the external.

Levinass analysis provides a means of understanding, or beginning to understand, Meursaults

actions in The Stranger. Meursault is faced with the threatening other, and in attempt to protect

his own subjectivity, he murders the other, thus maintaining his own status as a subject; however,

this act of murder has significance beyond physical death, significance that points to and, in

some ways, affirms Levinass analysis of what it means to be faced with the other and the

subjects desire for self-preservation, leading to active mastery over the others future.

Levinas identifies death with the loss of potential to act and to engage in an active

mastery of the self in relation to the world. Death is the limit of the subjects virility, the

moment in which we are no longerable to be able. It is exactly thus that the subject loses its

very mastery as a subject. (Levinas, Time, 74) For Levinas, death is more than the death of the


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physical body; it occurs on an ontological level with the extent to which the subject is able to act

upon the world. One can be ontologically dead without being physically dead in the sense that,

in reaction to the presentation of the other, the subject is immobilized into a state of inertia.

Death is devolution into passivity, a state in which the subject is unable to be ablei.e., all

potentiality is lost in the moment when the subject becomes passive in relation to the Other. In

this way, the subject is defined by the ability to act; without this ability, the subject is no longer

defined as such. Death is complete passivity, but it is unclear whether passivity is necessarily

death: perhaps a passive state is transitory, that one can move between passivity and activity,

making that temporary state of passivity analogous to a death without finality. What is important

is that death takes the active subject and forces passivity onto it; at the moment of death, the

subject is stripped of agency and made passive through the force of the Other.1

Levinas proposes somewhat of an extreme notion of the others role in the subjects

existence. The other plays the part of a diametric opposite to the subject, completely absent of

any optimistic notions of the interconnectedness of individuals:

[T]he other is in no way another myself, participating with me in a commonexistence. The relationship with the other is not an idyllic and harmonious

relationship of communion, or a sympathy through which we put ourselves in theothers place; we recognize the other as resembling us, but exterior to us; the

relationship with the other is a relationship with a Mystery. (Levinas, Time, 75)

In this way, the other is a resemblance but not a copy; it is like us in the sense that it shares

some of the same qualities, but it is not necessarily connected to the subject in any substantial

way. This radical externality is precisely what defines the other as other. Thus, Levinas

dismisses any philosophical notion of the other as an extension of the self, as a connected being

insofar as harmony is necessary for life to be meaningful. The subject constantly seeks to

1 I am differentiating between the other and the Other in the Lacanian sense that the Other represents the

external world whereas the other is an identifiable agent within the external world.


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incorporate the otherthis vast, unknowable aspect of reality that is both fleeting and

threateninginto the world of the self. One seeks to incorporate the unknowable other, the

Mystery, into individual consciousnessin effect, to internalize the radically externalnot

because the other is a part of the self but because the subject seeks to make it such. Perhaps this

is the work of the modern subject2: to find meaning through the work of implicitly relating

every object of analysis to the self, while explicitly maintaining the lens of empiricism and

objective knowledge.

In the case of Meursault, such an attempt results in the murder of the other. The impetus

for the murder appears as anger or hatred paired with the confrontation of absurdity: Meursault

simply does not care. It is apparent, however, that something else is happening at the point of

the actual murder. If Meursault kills the man simply because that particular action is no other

action is better or worse, then the anxiety with which he describes the situation would not be

present. Meursaults choice of words to describe both his thoughts leading up to the murder and

the his physical senses are ones that signify pain and anxiety, including throbbing, cutting,

stabbed, stinging, reel, split, tensed, squeezed, sharp, deafening, etc. (Camus,

59) Meursault would not express the amount of anxiety he does over the murder if it were

simply an action tantamount to any other action. Something else is at work here. He is

attempting to incorporate the other into his own subjectivity by destroying it, thus defending

against the threat of the other. Violence operates as a means of mastering the other in a manner

that one cannot perform on the self. One cannot master the self through violence to the extent

that is causes physical death; but insofar as the other is inherently disconnected from the self, the

2I hesitate to use a phrase that is often aimlessly and arbitrarily used in academic settings, a phrase that has

almost lost its definition; however, I mean it quite specifically to mean the post-Enlightenment individual who is

steeped in notions of finding Truth in the empirical world.


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subject can murder the other without threatening the self. In the sense of such radical ontology,

the murder is justified on some level.

In this sense, Levinass examination of death opens a theoretical space in which to defend

Meursaults actions, at least on the level of subject and object positioning. In his confrontation

of the other, Meursault is faced with the possibility of forced passivity to the external world. The

other presents itself as proof of Meursaults constitutive lack insofar as the other is something

that the subject perceived as an external part of the selfalthough, according to Levinas, this is

merely on the level of perception, not of realitythat one attempts to internalize once again. In

other words, the other presents itself as a lost object of desire.

3

In this conception, however, the

object of desire always appears as a threatening objectan object that the subject wishes to

attain but risks its own agency in that very attainment. For Levinas, this risk manifests itself as

the loss of the potentiality of mastery: This end of mastery indicates that we have assumed

existing in such a way that an eventcan happen to us that we no longer assume, not even in the

way we assume eventsbecause we are always immersed in the empirical world. (Levinas,

Time, 74) Meursault attempts to master the empirical world by mastering, or killing, the other.

His external reality, particularly the sun, plays an important role in the execution of the murder.

Meursault cites the sun burning his forehead and eyes directly prior to the murder (Camus, 58-

59), and this imposition of the empirical world, over which he has no control, influenced him to

act without considerationnot because the action was justified, but because the extremity of the

external physical world evoked an active response against it. In a sense, the other is merely a

proximal substitute for the untamable Other.

3 This notion is quite close to both Hegels and Lacans ideas on the function of the other. Although both

these philosophers influence the present ideas, constrictions of space in the current essay prevent further elaboration.


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Meursaults action is encompassed in the notion that he, as a desiring subject, wants

both to die and to be. (Levinas, Time, 78) The murderous act symbolizes his urge to preserve

his own being in the light of a threatening other; by eliminating the other, he sustains his

existence as an agent in a world of perceived freedom. At the same time, however, murder also

forces an acknowledgement of his own mortality through the absurdity of the murder itself.

Through the act of murdering the other with little or no justification, Meursault inadvertently

elucidates the fickle nature of his own existence: if one can eliminate the other with such ease

and lack of remorse, then the absurd world can certainly turn that action back on the self. Such a

paradoxas much as paradox can even be defined as such within this textis solved or at least

decreased in effect by the role time:

[I]t is possible to infer from this situation of death where the subject no longer hasany possibility of grasping, another characteristic of existence with the other. The

future is what is in no way grasped. The exteriority of the future is totallydifferent from spatial exteriority precisely through the fact that the future is

absolutely surprising. [] The other is the future. The very relationship with theother is the relationship with the future. It seems to me impossible to speak of

time in a subject alone, or to speak of a purely personal duration. (Levinas, Time,76-77)

The question of grasping links death and the other insofar as the subject is always reaching out to

something external, feeling, grabbing, but is never able to pull anything back. It is a return of

nothing, which places the subject in an unsettling relationship with his or her temporal future.

The external is equated to both the future and the other; and when one reaches out for something

but returns to nothing, one can only assume that the other, the future, is nothing. In this sense, it

does not matterif one kills the other; however, if one were make an attempt to find meaning in

absurdity,4

one could certainly equate killing the other to mastering the future. In the experience

4Such a search for meaning in the absurd appears pointless at first, but this does not need to be the case.

The philosophy of the absurd, at least according to Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, posits the pursuit of meaning

not as an essential aspect of life but nonetheless one of individual importance.


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of the other, one indirectly experiences deaththe unknowable, ungraspable future manifests

itself in the empirical world literally in front of the individual. The subject, faced with his or her

own death, assumes a defensive role against it, usually one much less drastic than Meursaults

but nonetheless has potential to be such.

In the sense that death is situated on a temporal plane, and the other represents the

absolute future, the future that is completely unknowable, the other is essentially a presentation

of the subjects own death in the form of the embodiment of the future; it is seeing the

unknowable. Death and the other become the presence of the future in the present. (Levinas,

Time, 79) Meursaults encounter with the other resulted in the presentation of his future

existence, perhaps with the same amount of inertia and malaise as his current position, causing

the extreme reaction against the physical manifestation of the unknowable. In such a

presentation, the subject attempts to master the unknowable, to at least bring the unknowable

within the realm of possible understanding; not all choose to destroy the unknowable, but to

master it in some form. Meursaults act of killing the other equates to mastery through violence.

In its destruction, the subject regains the agency lost through being in the presence of the

threatening embodiment of the future.

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Possessing the Other’s Future- To Die and To Be