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Enemy under My Skin: Eileen Chang's Lust, Caution and the Politics of Transcendence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Haiyan Lee
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Abstract

Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy, particularly his notions of transcendence and the “face of the other,” illuminates Eileen Chang's short story Lust, Caution (Se, jie) and, to a lesser extent, Ang Lee's film adaptation. Lust, Caution tells of an assassination plot against a collaborator with the Japanese during the second Sino–Japanese War in which the heroine's fatal decision to let go of her enemy results in the deaths of herself and her comrades. The story problematizes the status of the personal and ethical in times of war, occupation, and resistance through the heroine's path from the collective anonymity of national salvation to the theatrical solitude of underground activism and the intersubjective encounter with the face of the other. Also relevant is Hannah Arendt's theory of the (bourgeois) social, which in conjunction with its feminist revision prompts reflections on women's space of action in “dark times.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 125 , Issue 3 , May 2010 , pp. 640 - 656
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2010

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