Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The Subject of the Ethical Turn
- 2 Empiricism, the Ethical Subject and the Ethics of Hospitality
- 3 Sexing the Ethical Subject
- 4 Vulnerability to Violence and Ethical Sensibility
- 5 The Ethical Subject of New Media Communications
- 6 Secrecy and the Secret of Ethical Subjectivity
- 7 Censored Subjects
- 8 Suffering
- 9 Hospitality, Friendship and Justice
- 10 Death, or the End of the Subject
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Sexing the Ethical Subject
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The Subject of the Ethical Turn
- 2 Empiricism, the Ethical Subject and the Ethics of Hospitality
- 3 Sexing the Ethical Subject
- 4 Vulnerability to Violence and Ethical Sensibility
- 5 The Ethical Subject of New Media Communications
- 6 Secrecy and the Secret of Ethical Subjectivity
- 7 Censored Subjects
- 8 Suffering
- 9 Hospitality, Friendship and Justice
- 10 Death, or the End of the Subject
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Chapter I argued that the ethical theory is always read off of ‘the surfaces of culture’ and that the ethical Subject as something or someone emerges out of a specific cultural situation. Chapter 2 showed, with reference to Levinas's and Deleuze's thinking of the Subject as becoming, how in Levinas this becoming is, on the one hand, grounded in the foothold the Subject has in being and, on the other, how it can be said to be an ethical Subject in so far as this movement of ex-istence is already an ‘awakening’ to the ‘other-in-me’: the Other is already ‘in the midst of my very identification’. Another way of putting this would be to say that the ethical demand of the Other as my responsibility precedes my existence; it calls ‘me’ into existence. This may be contrary to the logic by which the Subject must precede the ascription of its predicate, but rather than thinking of responsibility as something which is ‘experienced’ as such, Levinas proposes that it is a force at work ‘before’ the precipitation of the Subject qua Subject from existence in general. However, at the end of Chapter 2 I sought to indicate also, with reference to Caygill's reflections on Levinasian politics, how the condition of ‘ethics preceding ontology’ did not guarantee the passage of the ethical into the political. In this chapter I shall address further the theme of how the ethical is read off of the surfaces of culture and yet there is no guarantee that the ethical will come to pass such that the ethico-political will prevail.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ethical Subjects in Contemporary Culture , pp. 48 - 68Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013