The Phenomenology of Love and Reading

Cassandra Falke

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781628926507
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

The current revival of interest in ethics in literary criticism coincides fortuitously with a revival of interest in love in philosophy. The literary return to ethics also coincides with a spate of neuroscientific discoveries about cognition and emotion. But without a philosophical grounding this new work cannot speak convincingly about literature's relationship to our ethical lives. Jean-Luc Marion's articulation of a phenomenology of love provides this philosophical grounding. The Phenomenology of Love and Reading accepts Jean-Luc Marion's argument that love matters for who we are more than anything-more than cognition and more than being itself. Cassandra Falke shows how reading can strengthen our capacity to love by giving us practice in love´s habits-attention, empathy, and a willingness to be overwhelmed. Confounding our expectations, literature equips us for the confounding events of love, which, Falke suggests, are not rare and fleeting, but rather constitute the most meaningful and durable part of our everyday life.

Interlude

Every reader “transforms” a book “into event and return.”¹ The givenness of a text dissolves if I treat it as an “object already constituted.”² The second part of this book involves an application of sorts, but this does not mean to apply a method of reading to various texts as though the texts were evidence by which to prove a theoretical argument. To pursue such a goal would be imply a superiority of abstract concept over the diversity of gifts that literature itself can offer. Having searched out the border of where reading can take us within the erotic reduction, I will describe in the next three chapters the experience of reading that the reduction offers. Since my own acts of reading occur as singular events, constituted between one reader and one text, the description of them makes no claim to predict another reader’s experience with the same text. Instead in describing the relationships that underlie acts of reading and acts of love, I identify modes of relating to works of art and other people that will manifest themselves in every act of reading performed by someone within the erotic reduction.

The three modes of relating explored in the following chapters are empathy, attention, and being overwhelmed. I argue that by habituating us to these modes of relating to saturated phenomena generally, reading empathetically, with attention, and with a willingness to be overwhelmed can shake readers out of the habit of regarding ourselves as autonomous selves. It is all very well that Lévinas and Marion, as well as Jean-Luc Nancy, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Derrida, and others have, from differing perspectives, besieged the walls of the autonomous self.³ Nancy was already searching for who comes after the subject in 1986. But the act of reading philosophy does not encourage the kinds of intentionality that would make the fluid, interdependent self a regular part of conscious experience. Philosophy may encourage its readers to think with a philosopher, which is an element of empathetic relationality, but it also encourages distanced self-reflection. Do I agree with this argument being offered, the reader is invited to ask. The philosopher’s own anticipation of counterarguments, his thesis and his evidential proofs, his questions and his answers all remind readers to step back and consider to what extent we want to think along with him or whether perhaps we want to think in opposition.

Even a charitable reading of philosophy, which imagines the philosopher’s argument in its most convincing form, still falls short of the empathy that happens quite easily with novels. Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels, which I will discuss in Chapter 4, invites readers to imagine being sunk in mud in Poland, ranging over sun-blanched hillsides in Greece, and looking at an old man in a Toronto backyard, a most unlikely combination of events although within a realistic frame. And we do imagine. Something about the voice or voices of literary works lowers the defenses that philosophy rhetorically reinforces. Unlike the philosophical works that explain the priority of an interdependent self, this work of literature prompts readers to see how blurred the division is between themselves and the characters portrayed. It never suggests through its form that we should not open ourselves to the experiences of identification that it offers.

Not all forms of literature invite empathy equally, but research from neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and literary criticism has consistently indicated that literature, particularly narrative literature, leads readers through experiences of empathy that become a permanent part of them. Suzanne Keen summarizes her finding from these various fields in Empathy and the Novel and concludes that:

readers’ perception of a text’s fictionality plays a role in subsequent empathetic response, by releasing readers from the obligations of self-protection through skepticism and suspicion. Thus they may respond with greater empathy to an unreal situation and characters because of the protective fictionality, but … still internalize the experience of empathy in a way that promises later real-world responsiveness to others’ needs.⁴

Within a phenomenological reduction that sees perceptual life as constituting the self without clearly delineated boundaries between “internal” experiences and “real-world responsiveness,” the reader’s amplified experience of empathy counts significantly among those acts of love that permanently change the self. Empathetic reading cannot predict empathetic action, but the act of empathetic reading signifies readers’ phenomenalization of a human experience from elsewhere unencumbered by an anticipation of return, an action that accrues to the acts of love in which I recognize myself.

With attention, too, literature invites a different kind of engagement than philosophy. Richard Lanham has described the new “economics of attention” wherein attention has become the most coveted resource in labor and consumer economics. In this new attention economy the act of reading either philosophy or literature must compete with video games, social media, soccer games, and work—often many hours of work—for reader’s attention. (In 2013, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found that the average number of paid vacation days workers received in the US was a depressing zero.⁵) Amid this widespread cultural attention deficit, books of phenomenology and bildungsroman sit dusty on the shelves.

One thing that makes literature worth paying attention to at all is the kind of attention it invites, which is engrossed, self-forgetting intention. Professional literary scholars have sometimes scoffed at immersive reading as undertheorized and unreflective, and there is a point to be made there. The acts of reading that most enlighten other readers when recounted are never merely immersive. However, literature’s invitation to immerse ourselves in the dynamic alterity of a literary text is one of its most valuable qualities within the erotic reduction. Reading literature frees us, in Marion’s words, from our amorous “autism” because it can draw our attention so fully (EP 24).

Literature’s ability to transport readers offers both promise and danger. Books may invite us to participate in characters’ epiphanies, their hard-learned lessons, and creative synthesis. But, what if they invite us to participate in their racial bias, their cruelty, their indifference to the inconvenient other. There is a danger of accepting that invitation because we are attending so fully to the book’s own view and not to the objections our own pre-reading view might have offered. The sense of danger that has followed novel reading in particular (oppositions to poetry, drama, autobiography, and satire are less common) since its rise in popularity in the eighteenth century makes it clear that the powerful form of attention literature invites is remarkable for its capacity to make us forget ourselves—for better or for worse.

Forgetting oneself has been constructed as both virtue and vice depending on what it is contrasted with. In the nineteenth century, working-class readers and female readers of all classes were critiqued for letting themselves be carried away by fiction because it was seen to compete with more virtuous demands on their attention—child care, domestic chores, work outside the home, or “serious” (utilitarian) reading, depending on the class and gender of the accused reader. In the twenty-first century, fiction reading is no longer viewed as a threat to these more “useful” activities, but is associated with other other-directed leisure pursuits such as volunteer work or attendance at community concerts. In the 2002 “Reading at Risk” study performed by the US Census Bureau, fewer than half of Americans surveyed had read a single book of fiction that year. This fact was much lamented. Dana Gioia, a poet and the chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts, linked reading to “active attention” and worried that the loss of “engaged literacy” would mean the loss of important “intellectual capabilities,” and “the many sorts of human continuity such skills allow.”⁶ The once-maligned activity of immersive reading has become part of a nostalgic longing for a time when leisure was less forcibly interrupted by electronic alerts for our attention. Other forms of immersive attention that compete with reading today do not offer the same level of self-forgetfulness. Quite often, instead, they justify hours of focus on the self—pictures of one’s self and one’s social world in social media, or record numbers one has gained in video games, or the familiar if tiresome to-do listing of the overworked. Consequently, the once-vicious activity of reading now looks virtuous. Philosophy, important as it is, has never been accused of distracting us, the masses, from the obligations of daily life because for most people it does not invite immersive, self-forgetting attention.

A third mode of relating to literature that benefits readers’ capacity to love other people is the mode of being overwhelmed. Marion describes four kinds of phenomena that he identifies as saturated: the event, the idol, the icon, and the flesh. As Chapter 6 discusses, literature saturates our intentionality in the form of the event and the idol, and it can be approached as icon. Love, too, joins the ranks of saturated phenomenality. We always experience the other as a saturated phenomenon if we really experience the other at all, through the figure of the face, which Marion describes as an icon. Love overwhelms us in a particular way in that it always, even at its most devastating, expands and benefits, even blesses the self. Literature uniquely prepares us to be overwhelmed by love because like the human other, a book as other opens itself to us more fully in relation to the intention we direct to it. As readers read, our capacity to intend a particular book is expanded, and that process looks like love.

Philosophy also gives us more as we open ourselves to it, but the “more” it gives is more knowledge, more skill performing certain kinds of thoughts, more awareness. Philosophy trades in understanding, which is shared and transferable in public because it is non-individuated. It is confined by its need to communicate identically to multiple people. Literature resembles the engagement with another person more because it offers more possibilities of imaginative variation, more of an “endless hermeneutic.” It reveals itself uniquely to each reader every time. It has the specific, unique locatedness that beloved others have so that we can return to books and people and be amazed anew.

Marion, himself a great reader of literature, signals at the beginning of The Erotic Phenomenon the ways in which literature can enact processes of love that philosophy can only describe. Poetry, he writes, can “liberate me from my erotic aphasia,” and novels succeed “in breaking the autism of my amorous crises because it reinscribes them in a sociable, plural, and public narrativity” (EP 1). In Marion’s metaphor, none of us are able lovers, but literature enables us in a way that philosophy itself cannot. Marion finds the strength to celebrate love and the discernment to begin describing it as a concept, but conceptualization, the honorable act of philosophy, is not the act we need most in love.

1Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Hermeneutics, trans. Jean-Pierre Lafouge (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2013), 61.

2Marion, Givenness and Hermeneutics, 25.

3See, e.g., Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: Essays on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press, 1991); and Judith Butler, Senses of the Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). Derrida’s conception of selfhood is a vexed issue. He uses the language of acting much more than the language of being, but Catherine Malabou and Adrian Johnston seem to have it right when they say that “Derrida’s thought may be regarded, as a whole, as a long and continuous deconstruction of auto-affection in the name of heteroaffection” where heteroaffectivity includes both the sense that “what affects me is always something other than myself” and that the acting and receiving selves within me already imply a heterogeneous experience of selfhood. Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 19–2...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Interlude
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright