In Search of the Real I

This paper is an attempt to contribute to the development of postmodern ethics by discussing the three contemporary Western thinkers and one Eastern thinker--Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Emmanuel Levinas and Acharya Nãgãrjuna. Derrida has no vision of non-reciprocal and perfectly self-sacrificial tendency of humanity beyond the phenomenality of experience, while Lacanian poststructural psychoanalysis is substantially close to Levinas’s ethical view. Lacan is assured that the way to the Real is open with what he calls “aphanisis in the Other locus.” Levinas’s claim is that humanity must not be first understood as consciousness but something beyond the function of consciousness. Consciousness’s capacity of the discernment has always already lost the proximity, the ethical dimension between the self and the Other. For my part, Buddhism would truly open the gate to the genuinely ethical dimension which, as the separate realm for the birth of phenomenon, makes empirical domain possible. Levinas calls the “saying” “the absolute breakthrough of oneself.” The “breakthrough” of the self has ever been the primary issue in Buddhism throughout its entire history, and it has never been more exposed and discussed in any other domain. Nãgãrjuna shows that in order to confront the dimension of emptiness beyond the finite, one even has to avoid the risk of conceptualizing emptiness. Emptiness is never a state of absence opposed to presence; the emptiness is fullness that is the dimension of “the beginninglessness of an anarchy and in the endlessness of obligation” as Levinas explicates. It is this dimension of the real Ⅰ that the reader fundamentally desires to reach and comes to glimpse. Toward the end, an ethical reading of Robert L. Stevenson’s novella, A Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is demonstrated. The reader’s experience of Jekyll and Hyde’s failures give way to her “experience par excellence” that can be explained by jouissance or the sublime.