Ethics, Subjectivity, and Alterity in King Lear

Cordelia’s defiance during the first scene of King Lear is among the thorniest issues in Lear criticism. There are also questions about her defiance in the first act and her sacrificial return in the fourth. Generally, critics either interpret her defiance negatively and condemn her (the question of her sacrifice remains equivocal), or they lay the blame on Lear’s absurdity and justify Cordelia’s silence (thus somehow explaining her sacrificial return). I will turn to the recent ethical approach to Lear in which critics usually treat Cordelia as an excess that both foregrounds the ethical themes of the play and resists our understanding. She is said to be like a trace, an evasive Other who can hardly be grasped or explicated. Her defiance and sacrifice thus mark her incomprehensibility and divinity. There are, however, problems and shortcomings with this view that I will enumerate and try to resolve here. I will mainly study Cordelia’s role and discuss her subjectivity with a closer attention. Drawing upon Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, I suggest that Cordelia’s defiance/sacrifice is not simply a choice; she (dis)embodies a logic of heteronomy and absolute openness to and receptivity of the other, a passivity which is beyond any onto-political sense of passivity and activity. Her silence and sacrifice can be discussed as pre-voluntary, nonintentional sensibility. We can connect the dots to explain her defiant behavior in the first act and her sacrificial return in the last acts. Her uncanny ethicality will finally bridge the current gap and explain her alterity as the other as well. Hence she is both a responsive self and an uncanny other in a peculiar combination of qualities.