A Struggle with Alterity: A Lévinasian Reading of Macbeth

Abstract

Abstract In Macbeth (ca. 1606), William Shakespeare returns all the way back to his metaphysics which he had demonstrated magnificently in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ca. 1595) and Hamlet (ca. 1600). These works represent Shakespeare’s dramaturgical treatment of Being, substance, essence, etc. One of the chief elements of these plays is supernaturality, or nothingness (non-being) in a sense interrupting Being and human activities. These elements are presented in Julius Caesar (1599) as well, a history play which has commonalities with Macbeth. Yet few of his tragedies offer a world so dipped in horror and darkness as Macbeth. Ethics might thus be a far-fetched component among these grisly sensations and in the bloody atmosphere of this tragedy, but with the help of Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995), traces of ethical exigency can be discerned. Approaching Macbeth through Lévinas’s philosophy, we attempt to study some ways in which ethics can be addressed and studied in this dark world. We will discuss Macbeth’s struggles with time (mostly his future) and the Other as metaphors of alterity intruding into and interrupting his totalizing conatus.