Rethinking the beyond within the Real (Response to Rasch)

Abstract

want to thank William Rasch for providing me with the opportunity to respond to his thoughtful paper (in this issue). I will proceed as follows: First, I will discuss the meaning I give to the word ethical, particularly as I use it to describe my own feminism as ethical feminism. Second, I will seek to clarify my own understanding of the limit as it challenges the traditional divide between immanence and transcendence. Third, I will return to my understanding of justice as the limit, specifically as this informs my analysis of Justice Blackmun's opinion in Roe v. Wade (Cornell, Philosophy of the Limit, 147-54). My use of the word ethical, as I use it in my definition of ethical feminism, is indeed quite close to Luhmann's own understanding of ethics. For Luhmann, as Rasch rightly points out, ethics emerges as the byproduct of the system's attempt to preserve its own reproduction from the ravages of moral infection. Luhmann, of course, has a systems analysis of the rise of ethics. For Luhmann, ethics and modern moral systems both arise out of the end of stratified differentiation in which the question of what con-