Suffering to Confront the Other: Reading The Book of Job in Light of Postmodern Ethics

The peculiarity of Job's story is that it tells us more than any other part of the Bible about why a morally and religiously right one suffers. This paper attempts to solve the enigma of God who is really beyond the limits of time and space and thus who does not allow anyone to judge him with the standard of morality and poetic justice. It demonstrates that God as described in The Book of Job is the real outside of the human subject. In discussing Job's story as a literary text the paper employs the religious discreet of the most respected and celebrated ethicist Emmanuel Levinas and the ideas of other postrnodem theorists like Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. I explain first that the Other of this religious text, a part of the Bible of the monotheism (whether it is seen as Christian or Jewish), is God as the Other of humanity, while it can also be considered as Lacan's Object a, "the cause of desire," or "the Other's desire." The human dilemma presented in The Book of Job lies even beyond the Kantian notion of a priori and beyond the matter of death. Job knows that committing suicide will not give him an answer to the question he raised. Levinas's way of thinking on death differs from Heidegger's idea of the possibility of death that one carries on in life. Heidegger's exaggeration of the authority of Dasein and care as its identity would mark the fear of death and reality that is felt terrifying. Infinity, the time of the Other, is not only what one waits to meet through death. The Other's position in this story, in the Levinasian sense, is that of a person who appears "in a dimension of height" demanding that the subject take the absolute responsibility for her/himself, and this idea of the Other in the position of absolute height renders privilege to the stories of sufferings in which characters go to sunder under the unknown force. In his long speech, God actually does not answer Job's question-why he persecutes Job. God's face is rather the center that is void of any element of traditional faith. God's face is to be confronted not by reason but by pure, unexpressible, transcendental sensibility of proximity, that is the dimension of ethical responsibility of self-submission to God. The face of God Job confronts now does not let itself be gathered into a totality, which does not only bring an assembly of meanings but violence and powers that construct the totality. The reader has experienced pain with Job and now the pain is in oneness with the feelings of joy. This concept of the field of immanence in which everything is destratified is very close to Levinas's notion of the proximity between the self and the Other, particularly because Deleuze and Guattari's thought of desire is what Levinas means by "metaphysical desire."