Love, War, and the Other in Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient as the Dialogic Field

This thesis is not only a move to diagnose, “re-treat”, and “water” the “desert situation”of Taiwan, but also an attempt to “cinematize” thoughts and discourses. It aims at applying the method of discourse analysis to diagnose the situation of Taiwan through the theories of French thinkers Jacques Ranci?re’s “the Distribution of the Sensible ” and Michel Foucault’ s “Biopoltics”; in addition, it will take example of the discourses of Du yaquan and Donfang Magzine from 1911 to 1939 to point out the exit or the “aurora of redemption” for Taiwanese people nowadays. So in chapter 1, through Professor Chen Tsun-shing’s brave cry-out of the “Banality of Evil” and “the desertification of discourse” of Taiwan in his condensed pamphlet Morality Can’ t be Deposed and Chen Kuan-Hsing’ s indication of “de-imperializing subjectivity” in his Towards de-imperialization:Asia as method, basically, what we can discover is a kind of authentic “care of the self” which is the root of “philosophy” and “democracy”, and through this kind of authentic “care of the self”, the “distribution of the Sensible” of this thesis is born. And in chapter 2, what we gonna explore is the background and the career of Du Yaquan as well as its relationships with the thread of the “politics of perception”. Retrospecting Du Yaquan’s whole life, what we can discover is a kind of fracture between “opinion”(doxa)and “knowledge”(episteme); and through this kind of break, this kind of way of seeing, and this kind of “thirsty for knowledge” or “will to knowledge”, the geneaology of the “politics of perception” —which manifested as the inseparable relations between a pre-existed field and a perceiving, reflexive, and speaking subject—from Kant to Ranci?re appeared. Consequently, in chapter 3, we can discover a kind of intention of the “politicization of the technology” or the “technologisation of the politics” —which is an act of giving art/technology a kind of “political mission” or considering “politics” as a kind of “lucid discovery” of “Ideal”—loomed out of the back of Du Yaquan’s articles such as “Introduction to the Yaquan Magzine,” “Introdution to the Magzine of Industry and Art,” “On the limit and the No-limit,” “Introduction to the Taxonomy of Low-Graded Herbs,” “the Evolution of the Material”. In addition, it’s a “hierarchical system of taxonomy” in light of the “visibility,” “technicality,” or “applicability”. Especially, in the double catalysis of the “subjective technology of translation” and “quasi-scientific discourses,” what we can discover are the shaping movement of the “reflexive subject” and homogeneized “productive community” and the preparation of the systems of knowledge he would like to import to China afterward. In other words, it’s a kind of “policed order” which took knowledge and “technology” as its goal. Therefore, in Chapter 4, what we can sense is the ideal of the “regime of amusement” and “society of manner” (Bildungsgesellschaft) in the “big innovation,” the “hematinic”advertisement, the “perceptual mistranslation”of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, and Du Yaquan’s importation of European notions of “evolution of mind,” experimental psychology, physiology, vitalism, “the union of body and mind” of Maine de Biron and Henri Bergson, the connection of photography and mortality as well as pathology and the idea of the “deviation” or “error”in the discourses of Dongfang Magzine after Du Yaquan assumed the office of the general editor of it. Especially, in light of the moves of promoting nationalism and taking the imagination of the “productive community” of militarism as its reference point, what we can clearly discover is the hierarchical system of the “great chain of being” of Aristotle— which is the “poetic regime of art” Ranci?re mentioned —the “policed order” and its delimitaion of “normal” and “abnormal,” “productive” and “idle,” as well as “healthy” and “unhealthy”. In addition, this “policed order” has produced a kind of reflexive—but also “desirous” and “unrestrained”—subjectivity. As the questioning goes to the chapter 5, we can detect the divined intention of putting chinese people at the position of a detached, objective “biologist”(therefore, in the taste of this barbarous fighting among “animals”, what happened is the “uncanny” overlapping of “animality” and “humanity”), making them feel exciting, venting, and making them sacrifice for the “literary community”—in Du Yaquan, Pin-Yi(平佚), and Chang Jisho(錢智修)’s articles such as “War and Literature” , “The Harmony of the Civilization of East and West after the War”, “Stilled Civilization and Moving Civilization”, “Dazed Modern Mind” and Du Yaquan’s engagement with Chang Dusho(陳獨秀) and Chung Monlin(蔣夢麟) about the “Debate of Culture of East and West” in the period of the First World War. In other words, in light of the different “customs” (ethos) of different ethnic groups, what we can discover is the “ethical regime of image” Ranci?re mentioned—through the process of “fixation” and “conceptualization”—make “East” and “West” two homogeneized, artificial, fictional, ultimate, exclusive, logical(or epistemological)categories. Particularly, in this kind of “policed order” or “ethical regime of image”, we not only can sense the origin of totalitarianism and the violence of “logicality”, metaphysical “world view”(Weltanschauung)—that is to say, the “montage” (le montage)—but also cannot watch the scene of the “emergence” (ph?sis) of singularity or the revelation or the “event” of “philosophical surprise” (thaumazein). Ultimately, facing the “policed order” of the”images” of Dongfang Magzine and Taiwanese situation nowadays, in chapter 6, which is the so-called “conclusion” of this thesis, what we can get a glimpse of”—through Klaus Held’s rediscovery of Heraclitus’ maxim of “Man’s character is his fate”(?thos anthr?po daimon), Emmanuel Levinas’ “intersubjective space” or the “subjectivity of the subject”of the Other(l’ Autre), and Shu Guozhi(舒國治)’s empowerment of the “idle comminity” of those “Wuxia-lovers”(看武俠的), our routine activities such as walking, sleeping as well as all kinds of the “politics of body” accompanied it—is a kind of “aurora of redemption” that we “used to ” confront it with the exclusive “grand narrative” of the logic of “policed order”. Especially, what we can realized is the fact that any concept, image, distribution of the sensible, or the “custom” (?thos) always has two side: the good side and bad side. Yes, the “distribution of the sensible ” may become an exclusive “policed order”; yes, the “habit” or the “custom” maybe the the “opening” of the “uncanny”(unheimlich) as Lacoue-Labarthe wrote, but do the “Wuxia-lovers” Shu Guozhi saw in Schiphol Airport and Township Office, those tea-drinking, card-playing, comic-reading idle people and those countless “ideal afternoon”, countless “good old days”, countless “undisciplined wonderful ages”, countless “travelers”, countless “wanderers”, or countless “purposeless compatriots” in Taiwan not a kind of imagination of “the political” or the “politics” that we used to confront the “community of the policed order” and open the “passage” or “space” we familiar with or we can be “singular plural” in it？In this “space”, “opinion”(doxa)and “knowledge”(episteme), “conscious” and “unconscious”, “sound” and “silence” achieved a kind of surprising harmony, and a kind of true “democracy”, a kind of “aesthetic regime of art” is born…a kind of authentic “there is…” is born…a kind of authentic “care of the self” is born…finally, our destination also comes into being—if we can imagine.

Traditional empiricism, the stout defender of the senses, is by all accounts sick. But perhaps a certain empiricist legacy is still fighting for life. Without seeking a resurrection of empiricism, the aim of this paper is to engage in what Levinas calls a ‘rehabilitation of sensation’. I want to resist theorizations of our life that would seek to exclude our sensible relations with things and with others from any intrinsic involvement with our understanding of them; to resist conceptions that regard sensibility as something in itself dumb and brute, something (as tradition would have us have it) ‘merely animal’. However, the trajectory of this discussion will not remain in every part faithful to its Levinasian inspiration. And it will not leave the traditional conception of animality intact either. In what follows, what my five-year-old daughter calls our ‘humanality’ will not be elaborated in terms of (trans)formations of life that Levinas, with the tradition, calls a ‘break’ from ‘animality’ or from ‘the animal condition’. Every other, I want to affirm, is every bit an animal.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 2. Aristotle, Ethics, rev. edn, trans. J.A.K. Thomson (London, Penguin: 1976), VI.iv.1140a19‐20. 3. David Wills, ‘Thinking Back: Towards Technology, via Dorsality’, parallax, 10:3 (2004), pp. 36‐52 (p. 38). 4. David Wills, ‘Thinking Back’, p. 51, fn.1. 5. Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming spring 2008). 6. ‘There are individuals walking along. Somewhere (usually behind them) the hail rings out’, or ‘The hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one‐hundred‐and‐eighty‐degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject.’ [my emphasis] ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 170–86 (p. 174). 7. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 65–66. 8. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 262. 9. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 85. 10. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 86. 11. Jacques Derrida, L'animal que donc je suis (Paris: Galilée, 2006). 12. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 132. 13. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 152. 14. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, London: Routledge, 1994), p. 53. 15. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 213. 16. See ‘Techneology or the Discourse of Speed’, in The Prosthetic Impulse, ed. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 237–63. 17. Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars, ed. Paul Patton and Terry Smith (Sydney: Power, 2001). 18. Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002). 19. Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London, New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 40–101. 20. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 169. 21. Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged, p. 76. 22. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 3–35; 36–49. 23. Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l'amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994); Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London, New York: Verso, 1997). 24. David Wills, ‘Full Dorsal: Derrida's Politics of Friendship’, Postmodern Culture, 15:3 (2005). 25. An avenue developed by Derrida in ‘“Perhaps or Maybe”, Jacques Derrida in conversation with Alexander Garcia Düttmann, ICA, 8 March 1996’, PLI Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 6 (Summer 1997), pp. 1–18. 26. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, pp. 30; 29. 27. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in The Anti‐Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 69–152 (p. 131). 28. ‘Every art [tekhnē] is concerned with bringing something into being, and the practice of an art is the study of how to bring into being something that is capable either of being or not being, and the cause of which is in the producer and not in the product. For it is not with things that are or come to be of necessity that art is concerned, nor with natural objects (because they have their own origin in themselves). And since production is not the same as action, art must be concerned with production, not with action. There is a sense in which art and chance operate in the same sphere, as Agathon says: Art has a love for chance, and chance for art.’ [our emphasis] Aristotle, Ethics, VI.iv.1140a.6–20. 29. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 197. 30. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 105. 31. Jean‐Luc Nancy, Corpus (Paris: Métailié, 1992); L'Intrus (Paris: Galilée, 2000). 32. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). 33. David Wills, ‘Jasz Annotations: Negotiating a Discursive Limit’, paragraph, 21 (1998), pp. 131–49. 34. See David Wills, ‘Notes Towards a Requiem or the Music of Memory’, Mosaic, 39:3 (2006), pp. 27–46. 35. David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 11. 36. See Wills, Prosthesis, p. 88ff.

Language being a social phenomenon allows the multiplicity of social voices with their discrete expressions. A free and permissive language of a literary work celebrates the co-existence of variant value systems with anticipation of the contingency of multi-accentuality. Hence the present paper intends to accentuate heteroglossia in the novel The English Patient from a dialogic insight. I argue that shared meanings and harmonious co-existence is possible even in a situation of homelessness, decentered nationalism, and discrete international political affiliations. The objective of this research encompasses locating heteroglossia among the people who are disillusioned by the metanarratives of identity, nationalism, religion, and other belongings. The study of heteroglossia in the people belonging to different socio-political backgrounds can help to find dialogism and benefits of multi-voiced co-existence. The research uses the theoretical framework of dialogism, specifically heteroglossia. It would be helpful for the future researchers to identify shared meanings in multi-cultural societies. This study finds a multi-voiced, dialogical zone amongst the confused and scarred souls who strife to exist after World War II. Also, it traces Heteroglossia in a decentered community showed in The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.

This dissertation is in an attempt to read the trajectory of the proper name of Ha(w)thorne who is interpellated as a subject by the symbolic gesture of his adding letter “w” to his family name. In this light, this small object “w” can be treated as an index of the place where the master signifier for the I-subject will come about. The master signifier, according to Jacques Lacan, designates the “quilting point” that intervenes while rendering complete an infinite series of signifiers. It helps clarify the fact that the subject is constituted in response to the real lacking-being in the Other (incarnated in Society, Culture, and Nation). Following Lacan, I maintain that to access and reassess the “proper” place assigned for Ha(w)thorne calls for an infinite conversation with such extimate substance as the letter “w” that precedes and pre-exists prior to Ha(w)thorne as a subject. The institution of the master signifier not only constitutes the subject in the field of the Other but maps the location of (national) culture, the lost Thing of which can only be retrieved in the locus of the Other. The introduction is centered on the heated debate between Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas on the “proper name,” from which the notion of master signifier is brought up. To compromise with the master signifier, an individual not only experiences the Althusserian interpellation but acknowledges his assigned place in the Other, which proffers a network of signifiers to actualize the subjective existence (“meaning”) in the Symbolic Order. Chapter One deals with the twisted relation between the misrecognized act of Utopian Imaginary and American modernity. I contend that utopia comes into existence on the account of the “nostalgia for the vanishing present,” is actually a counterpart of (American) modernity itself. Utopia is an empirical example of the radical transformation of modernity as well as the epistemological rupture. Meanwhile, it refers to the impossible jouissance of modernity: that is, to enjoy oneself without an alienating substance. In this sense, I maintain that the breakdown of utopia and its praxis lies not in alienation or false consciousness but in the impossible condition of “total” enjoyment. The alienating and preponderant object of individual subjects, which constitutes the subjective fantasy, is the hindrance to “total” enjoyment. The failure of utopian imaginary as a line of flight from the grip of modernity is best seen in Zenobia’s “death.” In Chapter Two, I utilize the Lacanian notion of the Thing to tackle the Hawthorne moral edifice, hinged upon the presumes evil as the dark necessity. According as the Thing reveals, we catch a glimpse of the sublime jouissance, an inherent transgression within the (moral) Law. It sheds light on the bar or self-split of the Law, the cross-bar of which is called the (evil) Thing (of Jouissance). In Chapter Three, I tackle the “Hawthorne and Woman” question from the perspective of Lacan’s logic of sexuation. To avoid the pitfalls of dualism or ideological critique of uneven representation of the sexual difference, I intend to re-address the signification of women characters in Hawthorne, whose existence is determined by the agency of the phallus. To write off the real-impossible sexual relationship, Hawthorne, as I will demonstrate, resorts to the convention of courtly love in which the empirical woman is elevated to the dignity of the (Woman-)Thing. In this sense, Woman (as a Non-Whole) marks the limit of male fantasy (epistemology) from which the male characters derive their phallic jouissance. Chapter Four is aimed at the agency of the scarlet letter “A,” which, with its sublime process, marks the lost “Thing” of the imagined community. The letter “A” designates the lack in the big Other, which requires the master signifier to intervene and actualize its potential meaning. On the other, only with the letter “A” can we articulate the archaic in the locus of the Other in a retroactive act of narration.

In this article, I focus on the temporal dimension of the differential process through which community constitutes itself. If community is premised on the sameness that is enabled by that which it excludes, and sees as a threat, then it must seek always to conserve itself and to render the future – which is hazardous in its uncertainty – calculable, predictable and determinable. In its search for stability and permanence, community must dominate time in such a way that it is overcome, that it withdraws from itself. Arguably, though, we would view time less teleologically and programmatically, if we could relate differently to the difference on which community depends. A form of hospitality that is predicated on an acceptance of otherness – not only that of a community's outsiders, but also the ‘common strangeness’ of its insiders – would alter the ways in which being-in-common is conceived, and would also change our experience of belonging. By the same token, such an accommodation could not but affect our experience of the temporality of the future. To accept otherness is necessarily to say yes to whatever may come, and therefore to live with exactly the kind of uncertainty and unpredictability that teleological conceptions of the future try to elide. After elaborating on the above understanding of hospitality – which has its roots in Samuel Beckett's notion of interminable waiting and Emmanuel Levinas's and Jacques Derrida's thought on hospitality – my article traces some of the ways in which Michael Ondaatje, in The English Patient, and Damon Galgut, in The Good Doctor, engage with the temporal dimension of community's dependence on difference.

This article broaches various accounts of love and ethical subjects so as to examine the ethical texture of love and to extend the scope of ethics and ethical subject to include love relationships. The argument divides into five sections: first, I stipulate the definition of ＂ethical subject in love, and clarify the meaning of ＂ethics＂ and ＂ethical subject＂ used in the present discussion. Next, in the following three sections, I remap the discursive encounters of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Martin Heidegger with love, examining different types of love, such as eros-love and philia-love, the implied ethics of these loves, and the question of ＂aimance,＂ to provide evidence for my thesis on relation as love and its ethical subjectivity. In conclusion, I draw upon Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway to illustrate how to apply the proposition of ethical subject in relation as love and thereby enrich one's reading of the literary text.

Love, War, and the Other in Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Michael Ondaatje: <i>The English Patient</i> as the Dialogic Field

There have never been more refugees, across the world from Myanmar to Syria, than at this moment. Many more millions of refugees are likely to be displaced by the effects of climate change. Why has politics failed to produce adequate responses to these challenges, and not heeded the lessons of refugee crises of the past? Are human rights and international law, or more radically, the case for 'open borders', sufficient to address them? Nathan Bell argues for nothing less than a new concept of the political: that societies (liberal or not, in the mode of the sovereign state or some other form) embrace an ethos of responsibility for others, where the right to seek asylum becomes foundational for politics itself. Such a proposal is at the antipodes of Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction, such that hospitality and not hostility forms the basis of political decision-making. This book comprises two halves: the first establishes the theoretical basis of the ethos of responsibility, with particular reference to the writings of Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, while the second half examines these theorists in the context of historical and contemporary case studies. Finally, the book calls for a ‘politics of hauntology’ in memory of the missing - those who might have been rescued, and those yet to come, who are already among the disappeared. In this urgent work, Bell demonstrates that a radical reconfiguration of the understanding of politics is required in order to safeguard the future and human dignity of stateless persons.

Despite cosmopolitanism's concern for the world's poor and its concomitant heavy moral demands, cosmopolitans establish a limit to the self's responsibility for the global poor. This contrasts with Emmanuel Levinas's view that the self has an infinite responsibility for the other, a responsibility that derives from the self's questioning of the impact of his freedom on others. From a Levinasian perspective, cosmopolitanism's restriction of the self's responsibility for others creates a sphere of rightful indifference to the needs of the other; lends legitimacy to a disregard of the other; forestalls an ethical awakening to the other; constrains the achievement of a more just global order, given that, from a Levinasian perspective, a better justice is built on the self's open-ended responsibility for the other; and points to a tension at the heart of cosmopolitanism, considering the coexistence of elements that both frustrate and aspire to the achievement of global justice. It is concluded that the achievement of cosmopolitanism's goals would require the acceptance of an open-ended responsibility for the other.

Prejudice against Jews was part of the political, cultural, economic and social landscape in the Union of South Africa long before Nazism made inroads into the country during the 1930s, at which stage Jews constituted approximately 4.5% of the country’s white or European population. Racial discrimination in a country with diversified racial elements and intense political complexities was synonymous with life in the Union long before Apartheid, with its strictly enforced legal, political and economic segregation, became the country’s official policy with the accession to power of the National Party under Prime Minister Dr Daniel François Malan in May 1948. Although the Jews, while maintaining their own sub-cultural identity, were classified within the country’s racial hierarchy as part of the privileged white minority, the emergence of recurrent anti-Jewish stereotypes and themes became manifest in a country permeated by the ideology of race and white superiority. This was exacerbated by the growth of a powerful Afrikaner nationalist movement, underpinned by conservative Calvinist theology. Fear of Communism in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the First World War; disquiet over the arrival of what was seen as disproportionately large numbers of Jewish immigrants during the 1920s; and the effects of the severe world-wide economic depression after the Wall Street stock market crash in October 1929, set the scene for an unprecedented period of antisemitic activity. This was reflected, in part, in legislation aimed at curbing Jewish immigration and the emergence of several antisemitic movements. This dissertation, which covers the period between the First and Second World Wars, explores the perception that South African antisemitism was a foreign import. Based on an examination of archival sources and contemporary publications, the study concludes that prejudice against the Jews was evident in the weltanschauung of right-wing and extremist Afrikaner nationalists long before the influence of Nazism became apparent and was not dependent on the influence of Nazi propagandists in the country. Aggressive Afrikaner nationalism along with economic antisemitism characterised the years between the end of the Great Depression and the outbreak of the Second World War. Antisemitism became a significant issue in elections and towards the end of the 1930s opposition to Jewish immigration was included as an official plank in the political platform of the opposition Purified National Party. Jews were also banned from party membership in the Transvaal, where most Jews resided. Attempts by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and its affiliates together with several non-Jewish organisations to counter the increasing influence of antisemitism, principally among the Right and Radical Right in the ranks of the Afrikaner nationalists, also marked the inter bellum period on which this study focuses.

This thesis explores the ethics of end of life decision making by examining the experiences of family members who were involved with the care of a loved one with terminal cancer. There are two main objectives to this research. The first is to understand the nature of the encounters between clinical care and families, how the dying trajectory affects decision making and how family dynamics impact end of life care. The second objective is to understand the process of moral reasoning and to determine whether the nature of ethical engagement differs for end of life decision making. Each narrative case study provides a sequence of events from diagnosis to the end of the patient's life. It also includes both patient's and families' engagement with ethical problems which were encountered during the course of the trajectory, an analysis of their moral reasoning and what both patient and families considered to be a good death. Over thirty hours of interviews were conducted with ten participants. Narrative analysis is used to draw on pertinent contextual information along with an assessment of moral reasoning. This is done in two ways. First, it refers to the general rules of moral reasoning (Cohen, 2014) and applies the theories of three moral worlds (Zigon, 2007). Second, through a structural analysis of the narrative, other moral positions and indicators are revealed. Using a phenomenological approach to the data, important factors which proved to have a considerable impact on engagement with ethics included background and intention, the nature of the subject's life-world, and inter-subjectivity. In addition, both temporality and the emotions were given considerable focus to determine the way in which these elements also shaped end of life decision making. This research responded to the need for more qualitative data for end of life decisions and, by combining both medical and moral anthropology, presents an innovative approach toward understanding both decision making and morality. It reveals that both life-worlds of patients and families are altered by a terminal diagnosis consequently changing the embodied moral worlds of the decision makers. The social and perceptual transformations, the sense of liminality and the power of emotions over their embodied moral worlds changed the nature of their engagement with ethics. Indeed, background experience, inter-subjectivity and emotions sometimes had a greater influence on moral choice than outside powerful social and cultural influences which made up their moral assemblage. My concluding finding is that moral reasoning, when it comes to end of life decision making, should be understood as an exceptional space which alters the parameters of our usual engagement with ethics. The findings presented in this thesis have practical implications for medical professionals who engage with families and also for social workers and other counselors who assist families involved with end of life care. It also has implications for the study of moral anthropology by showing how death and the accompanying emotions shape our moral perspectives, decisions and worlds.

This thesis aims to use a Derridean perspective to explore new postcolonial negotiations with respect to life aporias in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. Examining the genealogy of postcolonial literature, one can find that earlier postcolonial works were mainly focused on issues of anti-colonialism or colonizer-colonized hybridity. However, the new generation of postcolonial writers has veered to emerging problems of multi-transitional postcolonialism in the context of globalization. The postcolonial subjects in the late postcolonial age are thrown into more complicated and subtle cross-border flows—laden with the unresolved past and the unknown future. Life becomes aporetic. In The Inheritance of Loss, Desai successfully brings to view the necessities and difficulties of negotiating these new postcolonial life aporias. Therefore, this novel won her the laurel of the Man Booker Prize in 2006. Under an existent condition as what she depicts, negotiating the non-negotiable for all characters in the story becomes not just an impasse of meaning but also an unbearable duty of life. Derrida’s philosophy of negotiation addresses the idea of aporia, which I believe can help shed a new light on this postcolonial novel. According to Derrida, true aporia, by definition, signifies the impossible of responsibility, as the subject is haunted by the specters of infinite justice for which one cannot be assuaged without the expense of other others’ justice first. Negotiation per se is always enmeshed in aporia. One neither has the option to refuse negotiation nor complies with a social commandment without disrespecting or violating other ethics. Based on this non-negotiable duty, this thesis links the theme of inheritance in Desai’s novel with Derrida’s deconstructive negotiation in terms of violence, indifference and love. That is, how violence is used to against violence, how indifference is concomitant with a fundamental non-indifference, and finally how love is practiced in (and transgresses) the economy of love in Desai’s novel.

This thesis examines how the language of species pressures the construction of ‘the human’ in post-apartheid democracy in selected recent works by South African artists Nandipha Mntambo, Jane Alexander, Elizabeth Gunter and Steven Cohen. It responds to Achille Mbembe’s call for a “self-writing” that not only answers the historical and contemporary violence of animalisation, but opens onto an “ethics of mutuality.” However, while Mbembe’s “self-writing” criticises the Western model of the subject, it does not disturb what Jacques Derrida describes as its “sacrificial” or “carno-phallogocentric” structure. My argument explores the ways in which these artworks trouble this structure through the ambiguous return of its constitutive sites of exclusion. The theoretical framework is informed by Derrida’s “metonymy of ‘eating well,’” Mbembe’s critique of necropolitical violence, Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Donna Haraway’s readings of inappropriate/d, interspecies relationality. The argument foregrounds the limitrophic complication of the political, psychoanalytic and ethical limits between self and other, human and nonhuman, edible and inedible bodies, and literal and figurative ingestions. In so doing, it marks alterity as the opening to a non-anthropocentric and relational subjectivity. Chapter one deals with Mntambo’s re-articulation of black woman-human-animal and introduces the figure of the inappropriate/d subject as heterogeneous at the origin. Chapter two analyses the foreigner-as-animal in Jane Alexander’s uncanny animot and explores the hauntological and non-ethical opening to ethics that inhabits the constitutive violence of ‘eating well.’ Chapter three examines two drawings by Elizabeth Gunter and considers the how we touch the dead and are touched by them. Framing the thesis is a discussion of Steven Cohen’s performance piece, Dance with Nothing but Heart, which is used to position both the sacrificial logic of the subject as well as an ethics of mourning that writes the self-in-relation as the trace of the inappropriate/d.

In the recent history of the concept of culture within the English and Irish poetic exchange, the year 1916 must be the watershed. As stewards of culture in England, English poets mourn the death in nightmarish, mechanized battles such as the Somme and Ypres of individual poets, of the rural model of society, and of the nonindustrialized individual Englishman. Irish poets, on the other hand, turn away progressively from the violent nationalistic model of the 1916 Rising toward a distinct poetic language – syntax, diction, rhythm – and Irish myth and narrative. In the 1930s, however, neither English nor Irish poets seemed engaged with culture in the ways defined above. The left-leaning English poets were too preoccupied with international politics to write elegiac or nostalgic poetry; the Irish poets were too disenchanted by the Irish theocracy, which employed the Irish language as a means of punitive discrimination, to embrace the old culture. By the end of the 1960s, however, England’s humiliation from loss of Empire and from a yea-saying, complementary role in Vietnam had found expression in irony, restraint, and the anti-exuberance of the Movement. In Ireland, the return of the Troubles and a more meaningful recovery of the matter of Ireland, as in Kinsella’s translation of The Tain, turned the poets away from sectarian politics and toward their ‘gapped, discontinuous, polyglot tradition’ in Kinsella’s famous phrasing. By the end of the century, a majority, but not all, English poets seemed bound by their commitment to culture and, therefore, to persist after all in their attachment to the central experience of loss and its locus in the First World War, while Irish poets had found an authority in the Irish matter which seemed no longer at ‘a great remove’ from, but just under the surface of, their language and poetic expression, in which translation functions as a regular dimension of poetic creativity.