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
4 - Vulnerability to Violence and Ethical Sensibility
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
Irigaray's approach to the body provides a distinctive model for thinking how the sensual body and the textual body, or the phenomenon and language, are conceptual divisions made ‘after the fact’ of sensate life itself. The term ‘sensate life’ refers to the experience which does not yet belong to the body-as-a-whole; the body identified, for instance, by a proper name. Irigaray's approach to the sexed body in terms of its ‘morphology’ and its discrete sites of sensation, enables her to articulate an ethics of sexual difference which is read off the contingent contactual encounters between embodied Subjects. She puts the body to work ‘poetically’ in the service of a revaluation of cultural values and practices, and presents a radical alternative to traditional forms of critique which stem from the unexamined conditioning of their conceptual frameworks by the privileging of the male sex. In her encounter with Levinas we saw in the previous chapter an illustration of ‘doing ethics otherwise’. Despite the fact that she charges Levinas's thinking with missing the ethical significance of sexual difference, there is a clear connection between them in terms of their attempts to philosophise from the perspective of the materiality of the body, and especially with regard to the idea of the body's surface as the limit or boundary between interiority and exteriority; and as the surface of contact between the Same and the Other.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ethical Subjects in Contemporary Culture , pp. 69 - 87Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013