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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2021
This essay draws on Emmanuel Levinas's concept of the dwelling to understand how neoconservative emphases on family values impede ethical conduct in neoliberal America. Levinas's architectural understanding of egoism maps onto discourses that elevate the nuclear family to unimpeachable heights, and his notion of ethical responsibility provides a road map for rethinking social life along interdependent lines. To that end, this essay turns to Joseph O'Neill's novel Netherland to suggest that aesthetically mediated examples of family dysfunction can disclose ethical forms of sociality that move beyond the nuclear family.
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2 Since the Bush II administration, neoconservatism has been identified almost exclusively with American foreign policy, but this connection overlooks the domestic power of neoconservatism and the opportunistic alliances that make it a hodgepodge of constituencies. As Brown (ibid., 696) explains, neoconservatism “emerges from a contingent convergence of interests among evangelical Christians, Jewish Straussians, avowedly secular Cold Warriors who have made a fetish of the West, conservative feminists and other family moralists … random imperialists, and converted liberals and socialists.” If the election of Donald Trump has taught us anything, it is that conservative thinking tends to foster motley crews. A clear delineation of neoconservatism is not this essay's concern so much as the fact that many neoconservatives, from anti-hippie intellectuals to queerphobic and antichoice crusaders, have stressed the importance of the nuclear family to a healthy American future.
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20 In The Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), Luce Irigaray notes that, in much of Levinas's work, the ethical subject is tacitly coded as masculine. For a sympathetic evaluation of both Irigaray's and Levinas's work see Chanter, Tina, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray's Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar.
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24 As Levinas explains, “justice remains justice only, in a society where there is no distinction between those close and those far off, but in which there also remains the impossibility of passing by the closest (OTB 159). Social justice does not alleviate the self of its responsibility for the Other but works in concert with and supplements each individual's ethical duty.
25 Levinas's inconsistent attitude toward literature complicates this methodological procedure, to be sure. In “Reality and Its Shadow,” trans. Alphonso Lingis, in The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 130–43, Levinas views literature as an unethical form of discourse. But in Otherwise than Being (169–70), he contends that literature can assume ethical dimensions in its “implication of a meaning distinct from that which comes to signs from the simultaneity of systems or the logical definition of concept.” This point opens up two corresponding conclusions: first, that literature can intimate ethical alternatives by interrupting the concepts that ground our thinking and modes of life, and second, that literary criticism, and by extension skepticism tout court, contains ethical force to the extent that it reads for such interruptions. For helpful studies that put Levinas in conversation with literary studies and criticism see Robbins, Jill, Altered Readings: Levinas and Literature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Eaglestone, Robert, Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. Both Robbins and Eaglestone stress the ethical dimensions of criticism.
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28 In Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 54, Simone Browne argues that “racialized practices of surveillance” work to make a “hypervisible racial subject.”
29 Roy is quoted in Madeleine Bunting, “Dam Buster,” The Guardian, 28 July 2001, at www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jul/28/fiction.arundhatiroy.
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34 Here, too, we find an echo of Levinasian ethics, as Hans's image of his “mothered self” recalls Levinas's association of maternity with the formation of ethical subjectivity in Otherwise than Being (see 75–81). As we will see, however, Hans's memories do not always map neatly onto Levinas's symbolic language.
35 Readers of Levinas will note that Hans's fantasy of Christian transcendence bears no relation to Levinas's understanding of the alteritous Other as inhabiting a transcendent domain.
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