Re-Imagining and Re-Placing New York and Istanbul. Hatice Bay

Re-Imagining and Re-Placing New York and Istanbul

Re-Imagining and Re-Placing New York and Istanbul - Hatice Bay

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the Other expresses his eminence, the dimension of height and divinity from which he descends (Totality 198, 262). Levinas writes,

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      [The face of the other] escapes representation; it is the very collapse of phenomenality. Not because it is too brutal to appear, but because in a sense too weak, non-phenomenon because less than a phenomenon. The disclosing of a face is nudity, non-form, abandon of self, ageing, dying, more naked than nudity. It is poverty, skin with wrinkles, which are a trace of itself. (Otherwise 88)

      As Levinas emphasizes, the other is a complex entity. He is concrete and leaves traces behind; yet, he never allows the subject to fully grasp the ultimate picture of him. The subject wishes to understand the other; he is drawn to him but all his efforts are futile. As Levinas thus elaborates:

      A face does not function in proximity as a sign of a hidden God who would impose the neighbor on me. It is a trace of itself, a trace in the trace of an abandon…It obsesses the subject without staying in correlation with him, without equalling me in a consciousness, ordering me before appearing, in the glorious increase of obligation. (Otherwise 94)

      Evidently, the relationship between the subject and the other is asymmetrical, and this is why Levinas holds that “To recognize the Other is to give. But it is to give to the master, to the lord, to him whom one approaches as ‘You’ in a dimension of height,” and the outcome of the encounter is not that of reciprocity because “The I always has one responsibility more than all the others” (Totality 75; Ethics 98–99). For Levinas, the lack of reciprocal harmony between the self and the other brings out truly ethical moments because the absolute otherness of the other subverts the narcissist nature of the self and paves for him the way to become a non-dominating self who cannot attempt to grasp the other.

      For Levinas, the self-other relation can be defined as an intercorporeal communication which takes place in the Saying. While Levinas defines the Said as “an ontological closure to the Other” and the relation it signifies as “reduced to a fixed identity,” he defines the Saying as “an ethical openness to the Other,” which is “[a];ntecedent to the verbal signs it conjugates, to the linguistic systems and the semantic glimmerings, a foreword preceding languages, it is the proximity of one to the other, the commitment of an approach, the one for the other, the very signifyingness of signification” (Otherwise 5). In other words, while in the Said, the listener tries to thematize and rationalize the other; in the Saying, the subject listens attentively and patiently to the other and allows himself to be moved mentally and emotionally in a non-judgmental way. In the Saying, the subject takes the other person as he is without reducing him into a concept. This is an ideal ←46 | 47→form of communication and may not take place all the time though. The intersubjective communication in the Saying, similar to relations that are based on facing, involves misrecognition and misapprehension, that is, “the risk of lack of and refusal of communication” (Otherwise 120). Nonetheless, unlike traditional ways of communication which absorb, categorize and grasp the other, for Levinas, interpersonal communication, ideally, must result in emotional attunement, affective contact and attentiveness where both parties realize their own distinctiveness, singularity and irreducibility to a theme or to the Said.

      As can be seen, Levinas’s ethics is radical, and it has significant implications for this study for various reasons. Firstly, Levinas’s philosophy of subject is a radical challenge to the Western and especially American way of understanding subjectivity. In Western philosophical tradition of ontology, the privilege is granted to the subject, ontology and being. Accordingly, the self is considered as the agent of being, reason and freedom. Especially in the American thought the subject is a self-willed, self-sufficient and self-reliant sovereign entity. Therefore, the fragmentation of the subject that has taken place in recent years has been interpreted as the dissolution and dissociation of subjectivity at the same time. Levinas, however, believes that what makes us human and ethical subjects is a disruption of self caused by the encounter with the other. As Steen Halling also states, the subject’s displacement implies the end of egoism rather than self-effacement or self-denial (222). That is, as Auster’s and Pamuk’s works show the displacement of the subject’s sovereign sense of self is a necessary condition for the self to end his egoism and open himself to others.

      Secondly, traditionally, the other is put into a second place in Western or American way of thinking. In some cases, he is even assimilated or eradicated because of his difference. Although the other has gained some importance in recent years, still he is viewed as merely a source of enrichment. As Jeffrey T. Nealon in Alterity Politics states, the subject encounters otherness primarily as a reassurance of its own developing, shifting sameness or as a way of enhancing its own multiplicity (40). Departing from Western metaphysics, Levinas’s concept of the subject offers an alternative conception of the other. In Levinas, the other is superior to the subject. Furthermore, the other is a separate and an absolutely other being, who is beyond the intentionality of self and outside the totality of representation. However, this separate other is a prerequisite for the subject to be ethical and to lead a meaningful life. As Levinas maintains, the other frees the subject “from the enchainment to itself, where the ego suffocates in itself due to the tautological way of identity” (Otherwise 160). Similarly, Johanna Oksala in Foucault on Freedom explains that,

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      the other as radical alterity importantly opens the constituted subject to what it is not, to what it cannot grasp, possess or know…[T];he other is capable of introducing alterity to the constituted subject. The other makes ethical subjectivity possible, but also breaks the totality of constituted experiences by introducing a plurality in being that resists all efforts of totalization and normalization. Only the other ultimately reveals the limits of subjectivity and gives the attempt to transgress them an ethical meaning. (207)

      The other is so elemental in the subject’s opening himself to other and to his surroundings that in his notion of subjectivity, Levinas gives the primacy to the other rather than to the self.

      Thirdly, Levinas offers a radical understanding of the role of vision in interpersonal relation. In the Western societies, the relationship between the self and the other is primarily conceived of as a visual relation. As Levinas observes, “vision is essentially an adequation of exteriority with interiority: in it exteriority is reabsorbed in the contemplative soul and, as an adequate idea, revealed to be a priori, the result of a Sinngebung” (Totality 295). In our case, it can be asserted that although Auster strives for an ethical relation on the one hand, he also represents the difficulty of it on the other hand. For example, in Ghosts, seeing and gazing are elements that threaten the formation of intersubjective relations. Pamuk’s The White Castle in this sense offers an intercultural face-to-face meeting that is conducive to ethical relations that acknowledge the other as other without trying to grasp, comprehend, categorize or read him.

      In sum, in this chapter, it is revealed that heterotopias are spaces in which alternative spatial, social and historical orderings are performed. They are not merely “other spaces” or neutral expressions at the margins of a society; on the contrary, they are relational spaces which are counter-hegemonic, ethically and politically laden spaces. Furthermore, I have elaborated on Levinas’s notion of the self and the other, which argues that the other is indispensable for the self’s ethical becoming. Although the self is traumatized in his relationship with the other, nonetheless, in the end, he is endowed with glimpses of response-ability, responsiveness and exteriority. Finally, it should be obvious by now that both heterotopia and ethics will provide a rich venue for illuminating how Auster’s fictions offer alternative and constructive self-other relations, spatial and cultural orderings to emerge.

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