Language as the Ethical Other: Don DeLillo's Trilogy

[[abstract]]This dissertation aims to explore three of Don DeLillo’s novels, The Names (1982), White Noise (1985), and Mao II (1991) to see how language plays the role of the ethical Other in the postmodern age. The analysis, pivoted on Levinas’s ethics, would first stress the relation between language and the irreducible Other and go on to examine how DeLillo’s observation of language corresponds to Levinas’s ethical perspectives which are marked by sensibility. That is, DeLillo’s language in terms of ethics goes beyond the notion of language which is restricted to word-sound linkages. The empirical perception is the premier arena for the dialogue with the Other. The discussion on language as the ethical Other mainly falls on three distinct aspects. First, DeLillo in The Names presents the wor(l)d reading which comprises the profound conversation between the senses and the surroundings and imbricates the original mysteries of words. The discussion draws on Levinas's notion of diachrony, demonstrating how time accounts for the irreducibility and incommesurability of the elusive Other as well as the radical passivity of the self. Secondly, the discussion goes to the immediate and mediated corporeal language, hinging on the idea of death in White Noise. The immediate bodily language relates the self’s incessant fear of death. In addition, with DeLillo’s observation of how technology affects life, he makes an acute presentation of the self’s vulnerability and helplessness. In the ethical relation, death as the corporeal language is not merely overwhelming but self-othering. Thirdly, it is the exploration of the language of image. It echoes the phenomenon in the postmodern age in which images have become a more imposing and dominant language in communication and information circulation. With similar emphasis on the image as the irreducible and untotalizable Other, DeLillo makes a divergent attempt in writing from that of Levinas. As the self in the ethical relation is questioned, diminished and even dissolved, DeLillo particularly contends the importance to explore the self in such an Other-oriented ethical relation. Starting with Levinas’s notion of the responsibility for the Other, DeLillo demonstrates how the new possibilities of the self come out in his response to the Other. However, these new possibilities are not the contingent or provisional consequences but the presentation of one’s individuality. The individuality involves complicate reading of the ethical self, confirming there is certain kind of freedom in one’s responsibility for the Other. Lyotard’s idea of pagan language games and the notion of the event help shed light on how the self is spurred to make new moves in the ethical relation. That means the self is no longer single-dimensioned. A profound reading of the self is necessary to understand how the vulnerable and passive self is rendered the potentiality for new possibilities, a way to assert one’s individuality, in particular. In addition, such an exploration of the ethical relation makes a remarkable response to the discourse of humanism—to redefine humanism in the postmodern age in terms of the individuality in the language-pivoted ethical relation.