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One can exchange everything between beings, except existing.
-Levinas, Time and the Other
Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is a critical battlefield.1 As Kiernan Ryan, among others, has pointed out, earlier criticism invested itself largely in the debate over whether, in writing The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare was in the moral right or wrong, in the guise of timeless humanitarian or myopic anti-Semite. Such concerns are problematic in different ways, either precariously perched on constantly shifting platitudes of right and wrong, or nostalgic for unrecoverable moments of the author's deepest intentions-but insoluble at any rate, and ultimately not very useful. Newer readings, however, have abandoned these quagmires in favor of other, perhaps more immanent, questions; berating the earlier criticism, and rather than merely attempting either to save or indict Shakespeare, Ryan writes, "The Merchant of Venice operates at a level beyond the simplistic polarities of such sentimental moralism. . . . The point lies not in the vindication of the Jew at the expense of the Christian, or of the Christians at the expense of the Jew, but in the critique of the structural social forces which have made both what they are, for better and for worse" (21). Ryan dutifully isolates the societal hands that have shaped the characters in Shakespeare's play, but still subtler energies claim a commensurate role in the organization of The Merchant of Venice, structures of knowledge that were founded long before Shakespeare's Venice and that cannot be said to have disappeared today.
The ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas has not yet been brought to bear on The Merchant of Venice, and this ought to surprise for several reasons. First, Levinas's work-like that of many in his generation, a "critique of the totality"-was born of frustration with a very historically real anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust, this "political experience that we have not yet forgotten" (Ethics and Infinity [hereafter El], 78-79). second, The Merchant of Venice has long been viewed as an interrogation of the construction and mistreatment of cultural others and categories of cultural otherness, and certainly Levinas has articulated well and at length at least one version of this problematic, and could even be said to have initiated some levels of the discussion. This paper will attempt...