| In our reading of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels from the perspective of Emmanuel Levinas' philosophy, the primary goal is to show how Dostoevsky's novels are ethical novels which articulate the problem and the possibility of an impossible anarchical responsibility. The novels offer the explosive ethical climate for which Levinas desires to leave the climate of Heideggerian philosophy. To begin to show Dostoevsky and Levinas' convergence, often found problematic by Levinas scholars, in our dissertation we attempt to extricate Dostoevsky's novels from traditional onto-theological readings. In such readings Dostoevsky's novels are always identifiable as fictional illustrations of some presupposed ideology: Orthodox Christianity, rational egoism, existential freedom, etc. We propose, following Mikhail Bakhtin's reading, that these onto-theological approaches miss the explosive character of Dostoevsky's style, which excludes the possibility of identification, even the dialogical identification offered by Bakhtin himself. In our reading of Dostoevsky's novels from the perspective of Levinas' philosophy of the trace, substitution, and the saying that escapes any said, we confront readings of the novels that begin in the modus of control and order. Dostoevsky's novels should not be read from the perspective of sovereign control, but in the modus of sickness---to be sick as to be sick for the other, to be responsible for the other; the modus in which the other approaches me without being absorbed by me. Our reading attempts to follow Levinas' method of phenomenological reading which explores textual meaning to the limit at which it breaks, inverting meaning and unsaying the said. Through this unsaying the seminal ethical voices of Dostoevsky's novels, to which traditional readings have been deaf, become audible. Thus the possibility is opened of listening to the novels as to the other which refuses assimilation, and which inverts my sovereign position as critic into the position of being sick for the other, of being obsessed by the novels. |
