The Turn to Ethics PDF
Preview The Turn to Ethics
T H E T U R N T O A book series from the Humanities Center at Harvard Marjorie Garber, Editor Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Associate Editor Media Spectacles Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Editors Secret Agents The Rosenberg Case, McCarthyism, and Fifties America Marjorie Garber and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Editors The Seductions of Biography Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff, Editors Field Work Sites in Literary and Cultural Studies Marjorie Garber, Paul Franklin, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Editors One Nation under God? Religion and American Culture Marjorie Garber and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Editors Psychoanalysis, Historicism, and Early Modern Culture Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, Editors T H E T U R N T O Edited by Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz ROUTLEDGE New York and London Published in 2000 by Routledge 7 11 Third Avenue, New York, NY 100 17 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Transferred to Digital Printing 201 1 Copyright O 2000 by Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz Design and typography: Cynthia Dunne All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The turn to ethics / edited by Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. p. cm Proceedings of a conference. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-415-92225-9 (hb) - ISBN 0-415-92226-7 (pb) 1. Ethics-congresses. I. Garber, Marjorie B. 11. Hanssen, Beatrice. 111. Walkowitz, Rebecca L., 1970- BJ19 .T87 2000 1 7 0 4 ~12 99-053685 Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent. Contents INTRODUCTTIOHNET : URNTO ETHICS vii Marjorie Garbev, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz 1. What We Talk About When We Talk About Ethics 1 Lawrence Buell 2. Ethical Ambivalence 15 Judith Butler 3. The Ethical Practice of Modernity: The Example of Reading 29 John Guillory Contents 4. Using People: Kant with Winnicott 47 Barbara Johnson 5. The Best Intentions: Newborn Technologies and Bioethical Borderlines 65 Pemi Klass 6. Which Ethics for Democracy? 85 Chantal Mouffe 7. Recognition without Ethics? 95 Nancy Fraser 8. Ethics of the Other 127 Beatrice Hanssen 9. On Cultural Choice 18 1 Homi K. Bhabha 10. Attitude, Its Rhetoric 201 Doris Sommer 11 . Cosmopolitan Ethics: The Home and the World 221 Rebecca L. Walkowitz Introduction: The Turn to Ethics Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz What kind of a turn is the turn to ethics? A Right turn? A Left turn? A wrong turn? A U-turn? Whose turn? Whose turn is it to turn to ethics? And why? Why now? In the popular imagination, in the world of technology and scientific innovation, and in the contemporary political arena, in every newspaper and newsmagazine, phrases like "ethical responsibility" (and "ethical lapse") appear with startling fre- quency. Whether it's the sex scandal in the White House, the debate about human cloning, or the question of campaign funding reform, we have become inured to the idea that "ethics" Introduction is a kind of moral orthopedics. Often "ethics" seems to be situational and remedial, called into being by a local and immediate crisis. In a large library or bookstore, one can find hundreds of volumes titled The Ethics of X or Y the ethics of abortion, accounting, ambiguity, apartheid, animal experimentation, and (our favorite) "asking" (subtitle: "dilemmas in higher education fundraisingn)-and these are only some of the a's. The b's include bankruptcy, "boxing and manly sports," and business; the c's, capitalism, chivalry, and citizenship; the d's, divorce, deconstruction, and democracy, and so on all the way to the end of the alphabet, the ethics of "work and wealth," of world religions, and of "withdrawal of life support systems." "Ethics" is not only a praxis, but also a principle, and the essays in this volume ask how situated examples have reconfig- ured general theories. Ethics, contributors suggest, is a process of formulation and self-questioning that continually rearticu- lates boundaries, norms, selves, and "others." From Aristotle and Kant to Nietzsche and Hegel to Habermas and Foucault to Derrida and Lacan and Levinas to many of the essayists col- lected here, the concept of ethics and the ethical has been recon- ceptualized, reformulated, and repositioned. There was a time, not so many years ago, as Geoffrey Harpham reminds us, when "ethics" was regarded in the realm of literary study as a "master discourse" that presumed a universal humanism and an ideal, autonomous, and sovereign subject.' To critics working in the domains of feminism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, semi- otics, and Marxism, this discourse became a target of critique: the critique of humanism was the expos6 of ethics. Things have changed. Ethics is back in literary studies, as it is in philosophy and political theory, and indeed the very critiques of universal man and the autonomous human subject that had initially produced a resistance to ethics have now generated a - viii m.m"a Introduction crossover among these various disciplines that sees and does ethics "otherwise." The decentering of the subject has brought about a recentering of the ethical. In their contributions to this volume, philosophers, political theorists, literary critics, and a physician bring the particulari- ties of their own disciplinary training and interests to a vital complex of questions, with surprisingly fresh and challenging results. Many express concerns that the turn to ethics is a turn away from politics and toward moralism and "self-righteous- ness." All ultimately conclude that such concerns, rather than leading away from ethics, have helped to reinvigorate the intel- lectual field in the present moment. The first several essays begin by thinking through the tension between the poststructuralist critique of ethics and the ethical critique of poststructuralism. Lawrence Buell situates this ten- tion within literary studies: while some scholars-often those with disciplinary homes outside departments of literature- have looked to novels, poems, and plays for moral content and values, others, often situated within literature departments, have turned to "the dream of philosophy as a form of writing." The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Buell suggests, offers one model for literary-ethical inquiry by bringing poststructuralist thought into dialogue with traditional questions of justice and relationship. Buell invites a consideration of whether or not the critic's "ethical life-world of obligations" is, or ought to be, part of the question of literary ethics. Indeed, it is with the critic's obligations that Judith Butler introduces her discussion of Levinas and Nietzsche. Butler is interested in how both Levinas and Nietzsche have been implicated in the ethical crises of con- temporary cultural and intellectual history. Working through Nietzsche's suspicion of ethics and Levinas's ethical demands, Butler imagines a role for ethics after poststructuralism. Just as Nietzsche, a forceful critic of the ethical tradition in
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