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Home , Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Dostoevsky Journal, 3-4 (2002-2003),93-112.

SLOBODANKA VLADIV-GLOVER

SPEECHAND BEING IN

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's last , the main themes of his earlier major works come together in a monumental tableau vivant of the modem human condition. The portrait of the split subject of con­ sciousness ~n The Double, the tortuous confrontation of consciousness with sexuality and the symbolic 'order ofwords in and The Adolescent, the hwnorous treatment ofRussia's entry into the era of capitalism and mass culture in The Devils and the opaque - all these themes reappear in The Brothers Karamazov, transposed into a phi­ losophical register concerned with the Existentialist questioIl: ofBeing. On one level of the novel - that of the plot - this question is schematically rendered through Alesha's leaving ".the wo~ld" to enter the monastery as Zosima's "novice" aild his symbolic return to "the world;' on Zosima's ad­ vice, following the elder's death. In the course of this journey "in" and "out" ofthe monastery, Alesha accomplishes a rite ofpassage from Being in the "real" (existence pure and simple) into the non-Being ofthe symbo­ lic'order ofwords and logos. When Alesha enters the monastery, he is not on a religions quest but a quest for love. The narrator is explicit about that when he says:

Alyosha was not at all a fanatic and, at least in my opinion, not even a mystic.... He was simply a precocious lover ofhumanity, and ifhe took up the monastic way of life it was only because at the time it alone appealed powerfully to his imagination and showed him, as it were, the way of an escape for his soul struggling to emerge from the darkness ofwordly wickedness to the light oflove. 1

{ {.This· quest of love 'must be deconstructed, which is to say, understood in a sp.ecific context. For no word used in the novel can be taken at face value or in its conventional sense. The quest of love, in' this analysis, emerges as a quest for the . The central question of Being"or non­ B~ing is thus fr~med by the question of the relation of the subject - the

1. ,fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. by (Hai­ mondsworth, UK: P.enguin.,Books,.1982), pp. 16-17. 94 Th~ Dostoevsky Journal hero Alesha - to his brothers who are his "others" as well as to the father(s) and female (m)others.

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In phenomenology, Being is defined as that which exists. However, the interrogation of Being is itself tied to a particular existence - that of the subject who interrorgates it. Thus Being is always.connected to a point of view about itself. From this phenomenological pont of view, Being is everything: "Everything talk about, everything we have in view, every­ thing towards which we comport ourselves in any way, is being; 'what we are is being,l and so is how we are. Being lies in the fact-that something is, and in its Being as it is; in Reality; in presence-at-hand; in subsistence; in validity; in ; in the 'there is'.... Dasein always understands itself in teims of its existence - in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itselfor not itself:"2 Being is thus not only existence but also a potentiality and a negativity. For in.order to be interrogated, Being must submit to both an affirmation and a negation. Thus Being is "neutral" - neither a positivity nor a nega- . tivity but the potentiality ofboth that eschews b~ary oppositions and po­ larities. For Being encompasses both the negative and the positive pole. lJltimately, Being and non-Being are not contradictory since non-Being is .' a mode ofBeing.3 How~ver, since Being can only be posited as an interrogation, that is, as a question ofBeing, it presupposes or is framed by a certain self-reflex­ ivity that is coeval with self-alienation. Thus, unlike the proposition about the existence of , from \lvhich is deduced the unity of Man, Go.d and Creation (God exists; God created the World and Man in his own image;God, Man and Nature are One), the question ofBeing presupposes a split.4 This split is the separation of the phenomenological (Hegelian) sub­ ject from thel object or from God in the sense ofunified Being. Since Kant and Hegel propelled the concept of Man into the era of Modernity, the

2. , "The Question ofBeing," in Phenomenology and , ed. by Robert C. Solomon (New York and London: Harper & Row, 1972), pp. 307-09. 3. Andre de Muralt, The Idea ofPhenomenology.· Husserlian Exemplarism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 18-19. 4. Edmu~d Hussed eliminated "singularity" as such from his phenomenological philo­ sophy of perception and substituted it with a structure of difference, which precludes any unity of denved from a method of generalization which implies a unifying or "closedu value system. See , "Adequate and inadequate evidence," in The Essential Husserl: Basic Writings in Transcendental Phenomenology, ed. Donn Welton (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 116-17.