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Abstract
Levinas's work persistently challenges the claim that the sovereignty of the ego is the foundation for ethics, a claim he attributes to the Greek philosophical tradition. This claim emerges in dominant accounts of responsibility, in which the agent's intentions define his or her culpability. However, in Oedipus Tyrannos Sophocles also attempts to undermine this strict pairing of responsibility and deliberate choice. Oedipus undergoes a fundamentally Levinasian narrative arc by moving from self-assured sovereignty, based on his ability to comprehend the world, to an awakening to responsibility. In this essay I examine the points of intersection and divergence between the tragic narrative of Oedipus and the traumatic subject in Levinas's work.
Notes
1 “Enemies of the People” 31.
2 Levinas, Entre Nous 89.
3 The people of Thebes are familiar with the last three of these actions, and when Oedipus describes the incident at the crossroads there is no expression of moral outrage from either Jocasta or the Chorus.
4 Sophocles 12.
5 Ibid. 64.
6 Levinas, Entre Nous 12.
7 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 63.
8 Levinas, “Transcendence and Height” 11.
9 Ibid. 16.
10 See Chanter, “Betrayal of Philosophy” 224–40.
11 This distinction has, of course, been challenged in other ways by, among others, Derrida; Handelman; Gibbs; Chalier; Eisenstadt; Bernasconi, “What are Prophets For?”; and Meir.
12 Levinas, Totality and Infinity 27.
13 Idem, Otherwise than Being 99.
14 Idem, Totality and Infinity 37.
15 Idem, Of God Who Comes to Mind 60.
16 Cameron 14.
17 Williams 69.
18 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 323.
19 Knox 110.
20 Sophocles 13.
21 Bushnell 85.
22 Sophocles 28.
23 Segal 86.
24 Sophocles 41.
25 Ibid. 20.
26 Lear 50.
27 Sophocles 25–27.
28 Kahn 28.
29 Cavarero 9.
30 In contrast to Oedipus' shifting understanding of Apollo's command, Jocasta consistently questions its authority. In her attempt to defuse the conflict between Oedipus and Creon over the combined meaning of the pronouncements of Teiresias and the Delphic oracle, Jocasta casts doubt on the legitimacy of any prophecy. Rather than suspecting political machinations, as Oedipus does, she dismisses the very possibility of authoritative information about the future. That is, whereas Oedipus tries to understand his actions and takes responsibility for them, Jocasta denies the possibility of understanding and thus the worthlessness of the quest for knowledge: “Why should man fear since chance is all in all / for him, and he can clearly foreknow nothing? / Best to live lightly, as one can, unthinkingly” (Sophocles 52). Once Jocasta knows who Oedipus is and what they have done, her recommendation of willful ignorance abruptly takes on a more desperate intonation: “I beg you – do not hunt this out – I beg you, / if you have any care for your own life. / What I am suffering is enough / [ … ] God keep you from the knowledge of who you are!” (Sophocles 57). She thus represents an anti-Apollonian stance, disdainful and then fearful of knowing the truth.
31 Sophocles 66.
32 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 81.
33 Ibid. 82.
34 Oedipus seems to be afflicted by what Margaret Urban Walker calls “impure agency,” in a discussion of moral luck:
agency situated within the causal order in such ways as to be variably conditioned by and conditioning parts of that order, without our being able to draw for all purposes a unitary boundary to its exercise at either end, nor always for particular purposes a sharp one. (Walker 243)
35 Sophocles 68–69.
36 Ibid. 69.
37 Vernant and Vidal-Naquet 77.
38 Ibid. 128.
39 Yael Lin discusses the contrast between the dominant hostility of father–son relations in the Greek tradition (exemplified by Oedipus) and Levinas's account of fecund time, in which the son is not merely the narcissistic promise of immortality but the “opening up of a time that is beyond the subject's own” (Lin 91).
40 Pascal §64.
41 Levinas, Otherwise than Being 49.
42 Idem, “God and Philosophy” 146.
43 Idem, “Temptation of Temptation” 49.
44 Idem, Otherwise than Being 122.
45 Idem, “Some Thoughts on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” 13.
46 Idem, Is it Righteous to Be? 52.
47 Idem, Otherwise than Being 71.
48 Idem, “Violence of the Face” 179.
49 Idem, “Philosophy and Transcendence” 23.
50 Idem, Entre Nous xii.
51 Ibid. 89.
52 Ibid. xii.
53 Levinas and Weber 78.
54 Levinas, Entre Nous 3.
55 Thomas Pogge, for instance, has made a sustained argument that the experiences of severe poverty constitute a widespread violation of human rights, and that such impoverishment is the direct result of arrangements that advantage particular populations in wealthy nations. That is, the conditions under which the privileged live well-nourished, well-protected, and often absurdly comfortable lives contribute to the destitution and suffering of others, and this causal dynamic operates independently of all intention: “In the present world it is completely beyond the capacity of affluent individuals to shape their economic conduct so as to avoid causing any poverty deaths in the poor countries” (Pogge 17).
56 Levinas, Otherwise than Being 82.
57 Perpich 119–20.
58 Levinas, Otherwise than Being 64.
59 Ibid. 158.
60 Levinas, “Peace and Proximity” 168.
61 Idem, Otherwise than Being 55.
62 Ibid. 113.
63 Levinas, “Temptation of Temptation” 49.
64 Idem, Otherwise than Being 88.
65 Idem, Totality and Infinity 150.
66 Idem, Otherwise than Being 112.
67 Idem, Difficult Freedom 90.
68 Sophocles 74.
69 Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be? 117.
70 Sands 83.
71 Levinas, Otherwise than Being 50.
72 Sophocles 76.
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