“To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught.”

                                            —Emmanuel Levinas¹

Prolegomenon: What I offer here is a rumination that is related to a larger project having to do with the relationship between monstrosity and terrorism, and between violence and justice, in both Beowulf and contemporary life. This is a project very much indebted to the ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas. I first encountered Levinas indirectly, in Zygmunt Bauman’s book Postmodern Ethics, and ever since, I keep returning to the radiance of his philosophy—a philosophy alternately daunting and forbidding, but also, in the words of Jacques Derrida, “a magisterial teaching in the figure of welcoming,”² and in Levinas’s own words, a type of desire and “Love [that] aims at the Other.”³ One of the most definitive aspects of Levinas’s philosophy is its emphasis on hospitality and welcoming, and on the space or habitation of welcoming—a space within which the individual can withdraw in order to “recollect” himself, and “familiarity and intimacy are produced as a gentleness that spreads over the face of things.”⁴ Further, Levinas wrote that the home

is set back from the anonymity of the earth, the air, the light, the forest, the road, the sea, the river. It has a “street front,” but also its secrecy. . . . Circulating between visibility and invisibility, one is always bound for the interior of which one’s home, one’s corner, one’s tent, or one’s cave is the vestibule.⁵

It is only within the most intimate spaces of the dwelling that the enigmatic face of the Other can be properly welcomed, for “the ‘vision’ of the face as face is a certain mode of sojourning in a home . . . . No face can be approached with empty hands and closed home.”⁶ My thoughts here today are part of an attempt to wrestle with a question first posed by Derrida, “whether the ethics of hospitality . . . in Levinas’s thought would be able to found a law and politics, beyond the familial dwelling, within a society, nation, State, or Nation-State.”⁷ The urgency of this question, as well as Levinas’s voice on the matter, is, as Derrida writes, “intensified . . . by the crimes against hospitality endured by the guests [hôtes] and hostages of our time, incarcerated or deported day after day, from concentration camp to detention camp, from border to border, close to us or far away.”⁸

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I            Exteriority is not a negation, but a marvel⁹

            According to Levinas, the Other is not so much an actual face as it is a “pure expression” that always exceeds any limits we might put on it—“Expression, or the face, overflows images.”¹⁰ Even though I know that, in Levinas’s scheme of things, the face is not really a face, per se, but rather, an expression—and even, the overflowing of expression—I find myself thinking, obsessively, about faces, and more specifically, about the face of Zalikhan Yelikhadzhiyeva, the twenty-year-old Chechen woman who approached the admissions booth of an outdoor rock festival in Moscow on July 5, 2003 and detonated the explosives strapped to her belt, killing only herself.¹¹ Browsing the Internet one day searching for pictures of this event, I came across a photograph of Yelikhadzhiyeva lying on her back between police barricades, one first clenched on her chest, an empty beer can on the ground beside her head, her eyes closed, and her mouth half-open—the scene is almost peaceful, and the face, serene, if also vulnerable; after all, she was only twenty years old, the same age as many of my students. I have never considered a twenty-year-old as someone who could be capable of such a fierce will and desire to kill herself and others, out of vengeance, or perhaps, a desperate powerlessness (which could also be a desperate facelessness). While many were transfixed by the gruesome images of the shredded bodies of bombing victims under white sheets, I couldn’t get this face out of my mind, nor can I, even now. Yelikhadzhieyeva’s face haunts me precisely because it is what Levinas would have said is not really a face, but a façade, in which “the thing which keeps its secret is exposed and enclosed in its monumental essence and in its myth, in which it gleams like a splendor but does not deliver itself. It captivates by its grace as by magic, but does not reveal itself.”¹²

            Between August of 2002 and just this past February when a bomb explosion on a crowded Moscow subway train killed over forty people, Russia and Chechnya have witnessed the emergence of what many consider to be a shocking phenomenon—female suicide bombers. Because many Chechens reject the idea that these women have embraced a radical Islamic fundamentalism, and many Russians, conversely, have assumed that these women embody what they see as the “Palestinianization” of the Chechen rebellion,¹³ a certain tension, confusion, and even hysteria, attaches to the ways in which ordinary Russians and Chechens, government officials, and the international press have attempted to describe these women. It has been said about the female Chechen suicide bombers, alternatively, that they have been kidnapped by Islamic extremists, given psychotropic drugs, and then raped as part of their coercion into doing what no woman would supposedly do of her own accord;¹⁴ that they are emotionless “brick walls,” “pre-programmed,” “brainwashed,” and “de-humanised”;¹⁵ that they are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder;¹⁶ that they are blackmailed “zombies”;¹⁷ and that they are the harbingers of the fact that “something has come unglued at the heart of Chechen society.”¹⁸ But even more central to the issue of what might be called the troubling, yet intimate alterity of these women, is the name given to them, as a collectivity, by the Russian government and happily picked up by the international press: they are the “black widows” of Chechnya–that is to say, they are the actual widows, mothers, sisters, and daughters of men killed in two wars with Russia that have claimed over 100,000 lives, but they are also venomous black widow spiders, who kill with one bite.¹⁹ They are therefore both intimately familiar, yet also monstrously Other, and it is precisely because of their intimacy, that they frighten us and drive us to the language of exteriority: we say that they are inhuman, and even, monstrous, and their acts, evil and unspeakable. Terrorists are ultimately the figures of what Freud termed the Uncanny (or, unheimlich, both “not like home” and “like home” simultaneously)—they are the shadow-stalking phantasms of the Unconscious who have been repressed but never stop returning to view in various distorted shapes;²⁰ further, terrorists frighten because they represent the excess, or exorbitance, of our nightmares, and therefore, terrorism is the West’s obscure object of desire par excellence.²¹ Terrorist violence, as Jean Baudrillard has written, is both the “exorbitant mirror” of the West’s own violence as well as “the model of a symbolic violence forbidden to it, the only violence it cannot exert—that of its own death.”²²

            We must never forget that terrorists are real persons with real lives grounded in all the material and psychic particularities of the local—Zalikhan Yelikhadzhiyeva, for instance, lived with her sister in a brick house in a small Chechen village and studied at the medical vocational school there²³—and furthermore, that the terrorist’s acts are both real and immoral. But our understanding of the terrorist, if we are willing to embark on such a project, will have to begin with an understanding of our perception of them as monsters. As Jeffrey Cohen reminds us, the monster’s body is always a cultural body:

The monster is born . . . as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence.²⁴

In his “seven theses toward understanding cultures through the monsters they bear,” Cohen argues that the monster is always a “harbinger of a category crisis,” and further, “the geography of the monster is an imperiling expanse.”²⁵ Because the monster also always embodies difference writ large (usually along lines that are sexual, racial, and cultural), “the boundaries between personal and national bodies blur” in the body of the monster which always threatens “to fragment the delicate matrix of relational systems that unite every private body to the public world.”²⁶ The Chechen suicide bombers are especially troubling in this scenario because they bring together in their cultural bodies two “signs” that have traditionally terrified through their Otherness: “woman” and “nonwhite” (what Cohen terms She and Them!).²⁷

            And where is it, exactly, that the monster make its home? According to Cohen, the monster resides “in that marginal geography of the Exterior, beyond the limits of the Thinkable, a place that is doubly dangerous: simultaneously ‘exorbitant’ and ‘quite close’.”²⁸ The female Chechen terrorists are strange to many Russians, yet also lie very close to the heart of what Russia is, as a state, and therefore, it will never be a matter of simply driving them back to the wilderness from which they supposedly came, nor of just destroying them (Russia’s “official policy”), for as Cohen also reminds us, “No monster tastes of death but once.”²⁹ There is always a revenant.

II         The Other is the prime intelligible³⁰

Perhaps the most well-known monsters of Old English literature, Grendel, a “grim ghost” (grimma gæst; l. 102), and his mother, a “mighty mere-wife” and “sea-wolf” (merewif mihtig and brimwylf; l l. 1519 and 1599),³¹ live in the landscape which is wild and supposedly unlivable, yet is also situated at the very margin, or border, of the so-called “civilized” world—specifically, Daneland, whose chief symbol, King Hrothgar’s hall (Heorot), is upheld by the poet as the “best of all houses” (husa selest; l. 146a).³² But there is something peculiar, too, about this glittering and golden world whose light shines over many lands (l. 311): the only things that really constitute Daneland are the shore that separates it from the rest of the world, the horn-gabled hall, the paved stone road leading to the hall, the blood and flesh-splattered trail that leads to the monsters’ mere, and the outland territories of the monsters.³³ And, as James Earl has written, “The poem shows us the world of the hall from the inside and seems totally indifferent to the rest of the world outside.”³⁴

            If Hrothgar and his Danes have an obscure object of desire, it is Grendel, a “fiend from hell” (feond on helle; l. 101) who, in twelve winters of crafting crimes (fyrene fremman; l. 101) and making murderous incursions into Heorot, has become not only Daneland’s chief terror, but also its chief terrorist. Similar to the “ungraspability” of the female Chechen suicide bombers, whose descriptions reveal the hysterical confusion that results when Otherness breaks into the house and starts throwing dynamite, the descriptions of Grendel within the poem reveal both his inherent unknowability as well as his intimate familiarity, which both fascinates and frightens. He is a “powerful spirit” (ellengæst; l. 86), a “giant” (eoten; l. 761), a “dark death-shadow” (deorc deaþscua; l. 160), a “soul killer” (gastbona, l. 177), a “secret hatemonger” (deogol dædhata; l. 275), a “hell-secret” (helrunan; l. 164), and perhaps most importantly, because it is repeated so often, a “terror” (aglæca; ll. 159, 425, 433, 592, 646, 732, 739, 816, 989, 1000, and 1269).³⁵ Although Grendel is definitively strange and monstrous and evil, the poet also tells us that he and his mother are descended from Cain (ll. 104-14, 1260-68), and therefore they share a human kinship with the other characters in the poem.³⁶ Further, as Ruth Melinkoff has reminded us,

Grendel and his mother not only are plainly fleshly creatures but also clearly are more human than beast. Although the poet was sparing with physical descriptions, he provides some vividly revealing details: arms and shoulders (835a, 972a and 1537a), claw-like hands (746-8a and 983b-90), a light shining from Grendel’s eyes (726b-7) and his head dragged by the hair (1647-8a). . . . Evil monsters, yes, but with human forms, flesh and minds.³⁷

More to the point of Grendel’s intimate exteriority, he is simultaneously the “elsewhere ghost” (ellorgæst; l. 807), “fierce house-guard” (reþe renweardas; l. 770),  and the “hateful hall-thane” (healðegnes hete; l. 142) who Hrothgar calls “my invader” (ingenga min; l. 1776), pointing to his complicit status with those who lie sleeping in the hall at night, and whom he kills and ingests during his visits to the hall. It would appear that somehow, if even on an unconscious level, Hrothgar recognizes that Grendel is somehow his and the Danes’ personal nightmare, and even the poet mentions, at line 152, that Grendel “had fought for a long time against Hrothgar.” Further supporting the notion that Grendel’s feud with Hrothgar’s court is somehow personal, and that its original cause might somehow be rooted in Daneland’s ostentatious display of its wealth and power in its most visible articulation—the golden keep of Heorot itself—are the lines, early in the poem, that Grendel “sorrowfully endured his time in the darkness, [and] suffered distress, when he heard each day the loud rejoicing in the hall, the music of the harp, and the clear song of the poet” (earfoðlice/ þrage geþolode, se þe in þystrum bad,/ þæt he dogora gewham dream gehyrde/ hludne in healle; þær wæs hearpan sweg,/ swutol sand scopes; ll. 86-90). One of the reasons Grendel may be particularly angry about this music is the subject matter of the song itself—God’s creation of the world (ll. 91-98)—for Grendel, as one of the “giants” spawned by Cain, likely has a special grievance with God, and also with any men, like Hrothgar and his Danes, who appear to have been blessed by. Although the poet does not say so directly, we can assume that Grendel assumes that he is not, never was, and never will be welcome in the hall and the field of un-welcoming that the hall radiates might be part of what undergirds his rage against the Danes.

            Due to the language both the poet and the characters often use to describe him, it seems plausible that Grendel comes from that place where ghosts and demons and shadows dwell—either an “Other world” that cannot be seen or traveled to by humans, or Hell itself—and therefore he is a kind of terror from nowhere that always strikes at nightmare-time, when everyone is sleeping with one eye open. In fact, when Beowulf first arrives in Daneland and is explaining to the coast-guard why he is there, he reveals that he and his men have heard of this “unknown malevolence” (uncuðne nið; l. 276) that threatens the country of the Scyldings, and he wishes to offer Hrothgar counsel as to how he might vanquish this “I don’t know what kind of ravager” (sceaðona ic nat hwylc; l. 274). Therefore, it could be argued that it is not fair to say that the Danes have not properly welcomed Grendel, whom they can not recognize, in any way, shape, or form, as belonging to their world. In this scenario, Grendel is worse than any identifiable human enemy—he is worse than the Frisian or Heathobard who has been invited to dinner and is quietly seething over old grudges, and whose killing sword is always close at hand. Although the poem speaks often of the seemingly ceaseless cycles of tribal violence, many of the characters do possess some prescience about this cycle, and they even have social codes to contain it somewhat. Some might argue, then, that Grendel is somehow worse than these familiar enemies because he represents a kind of sublime rage whose origins and cause are unknown;³⁸ furthermore, his preemptive attacks could not initially be anticipated, he does not recognize the jural conventions of feud, and he cannot be fought with conventional weapons.³⁹ But I would argue that this reading of Grendel belies what Hrothgar himself tells Beowulf about who Grendel is and where he comes from.

            Because it is only the poet who tells us that Grendel and his mother are descended from Cain (and this happens in two definitive instances at lines 102-14 and 1260-68), it is important, I think, to look closely at how Grendel’s chief enemy, Hrothgar, describes and perceives him. A key passage for understanding this—perhaps the key passage—is the somewhat lengthy speech Hrothgar makes to Beowulf (lines 1322-82) after Grendel’s mother has burst into Heorot and killed Æschere, Hrothgar’s most beloved warrior, rune-counselor, and shoulder-companion (ll. 1325-26). First and foremost, it is clear that Hrothgar understands that the “hand-slayer” (handbanan; l. 1330) had a comprehensible motivation for her murder: “She revenged that feud when you [Beowulf], last night, killed Grendel” (Heo þa fæðe wræc,/ þe þu gystran niht Grendel cwealdest; ll. 1333-34), and further, she “would avenge her kinsman” (wolde hyre mæg wrecan; l. 1339). At the same time, Hrothgar describes Grendel’s “kin” in somewhat oblique terms as a “wandering slaughter-host” (wælgæst wæfre; l. 1331) who goes “I know not where” (ic ne wat hwæder; l. 1331) with her plundered body. But then, in a striking reversal, Hrothgar shares with Beowulf some very specific details (albeit, borrowed from the hearsay of “land-holders among my people,” but also from counselors; ll. 1345-46) about who, exactly, Grendel and his “kin” are, and where they live. In what could even be called slightly excitable tones, Hrothgar explains that some people have seen “two similarly huge borderers, holding the moors, elsewhere ghosts” (swylce twegen/ micle mearcstapan moras healdan,/ ellorgæstas; ll. 1347-49), one of whom could clearly (gewislicost; l. 1350) be seen “shaped as a woman” (idese onlicnæs; l. 1351), and the other, “harm-shaped, tread the exile-path in the form of a man, although he was much bigger than any man” (oðer earmsceapen/ on weres wæstmum wræc-lastas træd,/ næfne he wæs mara þonne ænig man oðer; ll. 1351-53). Most important, I think, is that Hrothgar knows this “ghost” has a name, Grendel (ll. 1354-55), and that he has no father—given that this is a world in which patrilineal succession is so important, one could argue that Grendel’s “fatherlessness” adds one more layer to his dimension of frightening uncanniness. Finally, in this same speech, even though Hrothgar claims that Grendel and his kinswoman “guard a secret land” (Hie dygel lond/ warigeað; ll. 1357-58), he then goes on, in shades on increasing hysteria, to describe in very precise detail this “wolf country”: there are fens, windy cliffs, mountain streams under dark bluffs, a flood under the earth, a lake with overhanging branches and frost-covered trees, and at night, strange fires on the water (ll. 1357-76). In Hrothgar’s emotional speech to Beowulf, we see that the margins of the world in which monsters live are both sublimely “secret” and treacherous, yet also geographically recognizable (and therefore, navigable). Likewise, the monsters themselves, Grendel and his kinswoman, are both dark shadows, but also corporeally material and humanlike, and therefore, as Cohen would phrase it, they “resist capture in the epistemological nets of the erudite,” and from their “position at the limits of knowing, [they] . . . stand as a warning against exploration.”⁴⁰ It’s obvious, I think, that Hrothgar is afraid of the secret, yet familiar country in which Grendel and his kinswoman live (otherwise, why hasn’t he already launched some kind of counter-offensive there, or traveled there himself to survey the obstacles?), perhaps because he realizes that the “difference” of this landscape is, as Cohen writes, “arbitrary and potentially free-floating, mutable rather than essential,”⁴¹ just like the bodies of the monsters, or the bodies of the men who sleep within Heorot’s high walls. Grendel’s and his mother’s cannibalism is very apt in this scenario because it both absorbs the warrior’s body “into that big Other seemingly beyond (but actually wholly within, because wholly created by) the symbolic order that it menaces,”⁴² and also disperses the warrior’s being, like so many pieces of flesh, into the wilderness. In fact, one of the most terrifying sights for Beowulf and his men when they seek out Grendel’s mother in her underwater den, is the spectacle of Æschere’s head sitting on a cliff beside the burning and blood-swelled waters of the mere (ll. 1417-21), and later, when he returns home, Beowulf tells Hygelac how upset the Danes were that they could not properly burn Æschere’s body on a funeral pyre (ll. 2124-26).

            According to Levinas, “The privileged role of the dwelling does not consist in being the end of human activity but in being its condition, and in this sense its commencement.”⁴³ Because of what we can imagine to be Grendel’s belief that Heorot mocks him, and even denies him welcoming access, and because we can also imagine that the Danes would not ask him to share a meal with them, partly because he’s killing off their ranks (and therefore is a legitimate enemy), but also because they claim they don’t know “where the hell-secret glides in his motions” (l. 162-63), Grendel is never allowed the possibility of being able to actualize (or even, redeem) the very human-ness that the Danes themselves have detected in his features and that the poet has written across his large, menacing body. By “leasing” Beowulf, as it were, to destroy Grendel and his ilk, Hrothgar is admirably doing everything he can to stop “terror” from enveloping and decimating his culture, to be sure, but he is also attempting to wipe out the traces of what that culture has purposefully excluded from its interior spaces (but which, nevertheless, founds those interior spaces). Hrothgar and his Danes, and Beowulf and his Geats, see Grendel and his mother as thoroughly Other than themselves, yet, as Carol Braun Pasternack has pointed out, the language in the poem often belies the lines of difference that supposedly separate men from monsters, and thereby also reveals what might be called the poem’s “political unconscious”:

Aglæca characterizes Grendel and the dragon and aglæcwif Grendel’s mother, but aglæca also characterizes Sigemund (893a), both Beowulf and the dragon together (2592) and, in two instances, ambiguously either Beowulf or his monstrous opponent, in the first possibly Grendel (739a) and in the second possibly mere-monsters (1512a). Klaeber struggles in his glossary to keep a clear distinction between hero and opponent, identifying the same term as, on the one hand, ‘wretch, monster, demon, fiend’, and on the other, ‘warrior, hero’. But, as George Jack recognizes in his edition, ‘fierce assailant’ indicates the common ground for all the referents.⁴⁴

Further, Pasternack explains that “The aglæcan are also wreccan, and this word and etymologically related terms point even more clearly to an oral-heroic paradigm in which hero and opponent fall within a single concept, the fierce outsider.”⁴⁵ Beowulf’s murder of Grendel then, ultimately represents a double-dispossession, especially when we consider that he first drives Grendel out of the “high hall” that is the home of those who are supposedly blessed⁴⁶ and by whose architecture Grendel obviously feels mocked and excluded, and then later, to add insult to injury, Beowulf desecrates Grendel’s body by slicing off his head in the “roofed hall” (hrofsele; l. 1515) of his mother.⁴⁷ And this is a head that, tellingly, will take four men to haul it along the horse-path back to Heorot (ll. 1634-39), where, somewhat disturbingly, after being dagged across the floor to where the nobles are sitting on the benches, it becomes a spectacle for awe, as well as a trophy (ll. 1647-50). Perhaps this is finally fitting, for although Grendel can’t dine anymore on the beautiful, shining bodies of the Danes, cracking their bones and gulping them down in chunks, nor does the light any more shine through his eyes, he can keep watching them. He can keep warning.⁴⁸ And likewise, Æschere’s head, left along the cliff beside the burning lake where Grendel’s mother discarded it (l. 1421), is also watching and warning. These, finally, are the faces of Beowulf that overflow all images and call into question the nature of the proper relationship of violence to justice—this is a problem that, to paraphrase Levinas, “exceeds the bounds” of this presentation.⁴⁹

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