It is on being accused that the ‘I’ is singled out in the accusative “declined before any declension, possessed by the other” (OTB 142). The subject is described as a self, from the first in the accusative form:71 “It is the obsession by the other, my neighbour, accusing me of a fault which I have not committed freely . . .” (OTB 92).72 This is the Saying, a passive exposure to being, an exposure to death–invisible, premature and violent. I refer to this exposure to death and the idea of being accused in the exposure to
Sovereign Good of the Greeks is referred to by Lacan as that which acts as “anti-weight” to the ego, the “amour propre the subject experiences as contentment in his pleasures, insofar as a look at this Good renders these pleasures less respectable” (Écrits 647).
70
Levinas says: “The myth Aristophanes tells in Plato’s Symposium, in which love reunites the two halves of one sole being, interprets the adventure as a return to self” (TI 254). According to Levinas, however, “To love is to fear for another, to come to the assistance of his frailty. In this frailty, as in the dawn, rises the Loved, who is the Beloved” (TI 256).
71
It has to be underscored that the term ‘accusative’ is specifically used by Beckett. In both the fourth Text
for Nothing, first published in English in 1959, and the poem ‘Sanies I’, written in the early thirties, Beckett chooses to interpolate the term ‘accusative.’ The term is taken outside its purely grammatical sense while also creating an intertextual network. The word becomes a particularly Beckettian joining of guilt to grammar. In Endgame I use the term accusative in the Levinasian sense without the specifically Beckettian meaning attributed to this word in the above-mentioned texts.
72 Levinas goes on to say: “In obsession the accusation effected by categories turns into an absolute
accusative in which the ego proper to free consciousness is caught up. It is an accusation without foundation, to be sure, prior to any movement of the will, an obsessional and persecuting accusation. It strips the ego of its pride and the dominating imperialism characteristic of it. The subject is in the accusative, without recourse in being, expelled from being, outside of being” (OTB 110).
the Other in both the analysis of Endgame and Happy Days (3.3; 3.4). The passivity of the subject in saying is “suffering in the offering of oneself” (OTB 54).
In the offering of oneself lies uniqueness of the chosen one, a traumatic uniqueness. Levinas calls this being chosen without assuming the choice “goodness despite itself” (OTB 57). Subjectivity can be pitted against consciousness because, as Levinas states, “. . . subjectivity is not called . . . to take the role and place of the indeclinable transcendental consciousness . . . It is set up as it were in the accusative form, from the first responsible and not being able to slip away” (OTB 85).
As I argue in chapter three, in patience, the ‘I’ endures violence from the other without, however, sinking into the nothingness that reduces time to the purely subjective: “it is produced only in a world where I can die as a result of someone and for someone in patience the will breaks through the crust of its egoism and . . . displaces its centre of gravity outside of itself, to will as Desire and Goodness limited by nothing” (TI 239). I argue that Suffering becomes sufferable in Leopardi and Beckett specifically because the I is ruptured but simultaneously ready for substitution.73 Levinasian ethics is echoed in the chosen works of Leopardi and Beckett in the way that ethics itself,74 as Critchley says, “. . . is critique. It is the putting into question of the liberty, spontaneity and cognitive emprise of the ego that seeks to reduce all otherness to itself. Ethics is the location of a point of otherness” (Cambridge Companion to Levinas 15).
This is the concept of suffering for the other I argue for in “La Ginestra,”
Endgame and Happy Days−a suffering that is not focused on stilling desire as is the case
73
Substitution is conceived as maternal support for the material destitution of another: “the immemorable
past that has not crossed the present, the positing of the self as a deposing of the ego, less than nothing as uniqueness, difference with respect to the other as non-indifference” (OTB 58). Levinas says: “Subjectivity is from the first substitution offered in place of another, but before the distinction between freedom and non-freedom. . . . It is the null-place in which inspiration by the other is also expiation for the other, the psyche by which consciousness itself would come to signify. The psyche is not grafted on to a substance, but alters the substantiality of this substance which supports all things. It alters it with an alteration in which identity is brought out” (OTB 146).
74 As Levinas states “ethics is no longer a simple moralism of rules which decree what is virtuous. It is the
original awakening of an ‘I’ responsible for the other; the accession of my person to the uniqueness of the I called and elected to responsibility for the other” (Is it Righteous to Be? 182).
in the Beckettian “suffering of being” or Leopardian “souffrance,” to which, before delving into the textual analyses, we first need to turn