In order to reveal why we need Laozi and Chuangzi ?C ancient Asian sages as well as Derrida, Levinas, Lacan, and Deleuze in the right way, this paper shows that there are two ways of having good methodologies of literary criticism. One is thought of D ...
In order to reveal why we need Laozi and Chuangzi ?C ancient Asian sages as well as Derrida, Levinas, Lacan, and Deleuze in the right way, this paper shows that there are two ways of having good methodologies of literary criticism. One is thought of Derrida, Levinas, and Lacan, that is a movement of the ethics of difference and that is to be connected to be Laozi’s ideas, and the other is ethics of direct access to the Other that is represented by Deleuze and Zhuangzi.
I discuss main ideas in the line of the development of ethics as I go through the traditional thinkers' ideas and Jacques Derrida's ideas of the deconstruction of the tradition, and Levinas's ethical discretion, searching for an ethical way of reading the literary text. I demonstrate in this paper how the thoughts on the alterity, or the otherness, of the Other is drawn from the tradition of Western metaphysics, and how Levinas's ethical idea of the absolute Other is distinguished from Derrida's deconstructive use of the idea. I always lay focus on establishing a postmodern literary criticism, postmodern in the sense that the way of analyzing a literary text dealt with here aims at the dimension beyond phenomenological reading.
In the Western metaphysics from Plato, who is usually regarded to have started dualism as the point of departure of the Western metaphysics, to Hegel, who started to break it down, philosophers were searching for absolute knowledge in order to throw objective lights through logic on true reality. The first step into philosophy was always to hypostatize the primordial and absolute being or truth and categorize it as the unknowable, or God in terms of identity. What representational thinking could not reason was expressed as the absolute existence, or the unreachable outside of human subjectivity. Yet the concept of absolute existence, however abstractly it was described, was only fictitious, precisely because it was a concept, which was formed in the human mind: it was merely a representation of the lost absolute. That is, the unknowable Other was not thought as the unknowable as such: the outside of human subjectivity was conceptualized, or placed in the inside.
Derrida, Levinas and Lacan, through their theories of <difference>, strive to show that the relation of the self and the Other is beyond the simple renewal of the possible in the inevitable senescence of the subject, and to explain how transcendence can be connected to the ontological ground of the self. Among the ancient Taoist sages, Laozi could be categorized with the one who distinctively thought in this style. Let us go one more step with Levinas's description of the other-self relation. The Other In the paper, I illuminate the fact that Derrida, Levinas, Lacan, and Laozi’s thinking is clearly to be seen different from Deleuze and Chuangzi’s system of thoughts that emphasize the act of finding the unity.