레비나스의 시간과 죽음의 타자성

Alterity of Time and Death in Levinas: Lily Briscoe in Woolf's To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse reveals the ethical philosophy in regard to the subject's relation to the 'other.' The narrator in this novel argues that the self is bound to the other, more than to its own being. The subject can even feel sorrow or responsibility for the death of the other. This paper analyzes the issues of alterity in Woolf’s novel through Levinas's theory of the Other. Levinas emphasizes the immediacy of the face- to- face; the immediacy of the subject's responsibility to the other. The self must always be responsible for the other, before the self can choose not to be. Levinas articulates a notion of time as the subject's relationship with the other. Time in "Time Passes" is the unknowable and the untraceable signature of the other, particularly of the other's death. Time in this novel anticipates the "diachrony," "infinity," and "otherness" of Levinas. This novel anticipates Levinas's idea that the subject's response to the death of the other is related to the notion of time.