『다리 위에서 본 전망』

A View from the Bridge: the Correlative between Arthur Miller's Ethics and Levinasian Philosophy

This play proceeds in two diverged ways: the exclusion of the other through sexual distortion and that through the violence of homogeneous society. Miller not only handles Eddie's violence against the other inflamed by his distorted desire through the relationship between Katherine and Rodolpho but also describes distrust, whistle-blowing, and betrayal among longshoremen intensified by an upsurge of illegal immigrants through Marco. Though the two-pronged stories seem to develop separately, they all center upon beholding the other as a threatening object. In this play Miller discloses how through his distorted sexual-egotism Eddie regards the other not as an object of hospitality but as that of exclusion. Miller shows that the contemporary society intends to exclude the other by seeing it as a foreign entity who cannot be homogenized into the oneness. He criticizes that the forceful attempt to assimilate the other into the same worsens the human condition of modern society at once and destroys ethical responsibility for a better society. Miller's diagnosis of illness of modern society goes in parallel with that of Levinas whose philosophy questions the priority of the same over the other in modern society. In that respect, this paper aims to address itself to the problem of the same and the other through the correlative between Miller's ethics and Levinasian philosophy.