Ethical Gesture Research Articles

When Art Becomes a Rectification of Humankind: Gary and Malraux, A Same Aesthetic Humanism?

When we question the humanism of Gary or Malraux, we see the question of art arise on all sides. Aesthetics and ethics indeed seem intrinsically linked, firstly because, for them, art is a way of denying the inhuman, whether it be the absurdity of our condition or the crushing weight of History. At a time when the Second World War brought human barbarism to the forefront, what the artist gave us in his works was a finally acceptable image of humankind. Art, according to them, is, at the same time, a consolation and a shelter for humanist ideals, and an ethical gesture in itself. We will try here to confront in Gary’s and Malraux’s books the connections between art and humanism, and to question the existence in these two authors - while preserving the specificities of each - of what one could call an aesthetic humanism.

Exhibition Review: Every Day. Art. Solidarity. Resistance

Exhibition Review: <i>Every Day. Art. Solidarity. Resistance</i>

Primed for Suffering: Gender, Subjectivity, and Spectatorship in Spanish Crisis Cinema

Examining three fiction films (Techo y comida, Ayer no termina nunca, and Magical Girl), this essay illuminates the traces of the economic crisis in recent Spanish cinema, focusing on how it is inscribed on female-gendered bodies and subjectivities. In exploring how female pain accumulates across the boundaries of genre in these disparate films, it asks what kind of gendered subjects these films construct, and what work women's suffering is asked to perform, both for the benefit of the film's plot and the spectator's engagement. It shows how, even in cinema sympathetic to those devastated by crisis, women are cast as disposable raw material, as it were, “primed for suffering.” At the same time, it argues, these films bring to light and embody experiences that are seldom revealed, enacting an ethical gesture of potential solidarity with those devastated by multiple forms of crisis.

Afterword: An exhibition about hospitality. A more sensitive perception of vulnerability

This afterword reflects on the tension between art, politics and philosophy at the thematic core of this Special Issue, ‘Migrants and Refugees Between Aesthetics and Politics’. Brugère calls attention to a recent art exhibition – one that came out of her book with Guillaume Le Blanc, The End of Hospitality – at the Museum of the History of Immigration, in Paris, as a way to frame a conflict between two ideas of hospitality, or the broad ethical gesture to welcome others and the political right that more and more governments are unable to uphold as borders tighten around the globe. The afterword elaborates on the aims of the exhibition, namely, to show ‘a correspondence between art and philosophy on the question of hospitality’. Rather than a mere representation of discourse around migration, the artwork displays a praxis of the imagination, one in which cultural production by and about refugees brings spectators to recognize a shared sense of vulnerability and to question received ideas on migration. In this manner, contemporary art forms become an essential link in the ongoing struggle between ethics and politics.

El cuerpo y el tiempo: márgenes del lugar y el no lugar en las experiencias educativas

El ser humano es, en tanto humano, un cuerpo que se expone permanentemente al paso del tiempo, a las inclemencias del mundo, a la fragilidad de la vida. El ser humano como corporeidad nace en un contexto, en un lugar y en una cultura; sin embargo, su plasticidad y multidimensionalidad resignifican el contexto. Sus relaciones con los otros y consigo mismo definen el lugar y el no lugar como escenarios de encuentro y relaciones. La educación como lugar de encuentro, hace posible la donación y la entrega que parten del cuerpo del maestro para su aprendiz, una relación sin contrato ni acuerdo, un gesto ético que emerge como promesa de un mejor porvenir en el que las experiencias educativas acontecen y con ellas, el nombre propio del otro.

Stranger-making as difference: childhood memories of belonging and exclusion by undergraduates of color

ABSTRACTIn this article, we draw from the notion of stranger-making to focus on how undergraduates of color at one large university in New York City recount their subjective experiences with inclusion and exclusion at the borderlands of educational spaces. We use narratives to evoke the unfolding of life events and to destabilize categories of difference that are all too often based on a politics of perception rather than an ethical gesture to know. This paper presents four selected vignettes that demonstrate the instability of being a racialized human and draws attention to how belonging, or socially felt memberships, is simultaneously constructed and contested in schools, and how these experiences provoke turning points in an otherwise assumed linearity from childhood to the university.

Méditer selon Joë Bousquet

A German bullet broke French poet and writer Joë Bousquet’s spine during World War I, and he spent the rest of his life writing in bed, paralyzed. His literary legacy demonstrates an experimental approach to Cartesianism. Whereas Descartes seeks to explain the human mind, Bousquet’s aphorisms argue that a commitment to ethics is fundamental to knowledge and creation. Bousquet interpreted his wound as his destiny. Drawing on Pierre Hadot’s work on the Stoics, I compare the notes that Bousquet wrote to himself with Marcus Aurelius’ journals. In this article, I decipher Bousquet’s meditations as spiritual exercises influenced by ancient philosophy that conceived ethics as a daily praxis rather than as a theory. I examine meditation as a reconfiguring of the body in an ethical gesture, just as Deleuze reads Spinoza in his last seminars at Vincennes.

Spectacular Nostalgia: Modernism and Dramatic Form in Kate O'Brien's Pray for the Wanderer

This essay draws attention to how the avant-garde undertakings of Irish Revivalism, particularly those of the dramatic movement, influenced Kate O'Brien's writing in the wake of high modernism. Published in 1938, Pray for the Wanderer espouses a nostalgia for the widespread, collective political and cultural activities that suffused Irish public life before the ascension of Éamon de Valera. It metabolizes dramatic form to showcase the limitations of the Free State, interrupting the novel's realist plot with extended monologues celebrating individualism. The novel's awkward form can be read as a considered political and ethical gesture pushing the narrative into the domain of modernist difficulty to impede and productively challenge the reader.

Engaged disengagement: reframing as feminist critique in Vanessa Place’s Tragodía

ABSTRACTThis essay positions Vanessa Place’s Tragodía (2011) as an instance of reframing as contemporary feminist cultural critique. An enquiry into allegory, hermeneutics, and the performative use of indifference in Place’s conceptual writing generates insights into new narrative conditions produced by Place’s work. Tragodía does not represent trauma but rather generates trauma through a poetic practice that has a bipartite structure: conceptual writing (allegory) and Place’s performances of the narratives. Place’s performance is read in this analysis as an ancillary act of reframing that raises the question of what might be at stake in the performative use of indifference. Understood as a strategy of failure, Place’s performance parallels the lack of mediation in the conceptual act of reframing. Positioned counter to the linguistic deformation of the subjects' speech acts and the erasure of affect that occurs in the legal narratives through the act of interpretation, the refusal to interpret implicit in the act of reframing in Tragodía is an ethical gesture, a paratextual pathway to metamorphosis. In its refusal to interpret, Tragodía creates a site of contextual resistance to the oppression of the subjects’ organic narratives by the institutional language of the law, and offers a new textual field of meaning-making.

The Grift of Death?: The Ethics of Murder Narratives

What is the work of literature that is based on murders that have occurred in the real world? This essay interrogates the work as just that: an enterprise of labour that challenges as it engages the work of literature as an ethical project. In its endeavour to account for the work, the essay draws upon Jacques Derrida’s work, namely his writings on literature and death, to suggest how murder narratives might be understood as potentially ethical gestures that are caught up in the potentially unethical economy of capitalism. If death is understood as that which denies the subject access to language and self-narration, then can the narrative work taken up on those subjects’ behalf by others reasonably be called exploitative? By what measure ought we evaluate narratives based on real-world deaths? As is often the case, the relative success of a work might be assessed by its ending. This essay poses the following question: To what end do murder narratives proceed?

Czy można mówić o tym, o czym mówić nie można? Analiza kategorii archiwum jako figury władzy w pismach Michela Foucaulta

The article discusses Michel Foucault’s notion of “archive” which for the philosopher should be understood in the broader sense, not only as a place of gathering and of preserving documents but also as a discursive machine which forms and constructs a subject identity. The prefix “arche” suggests that every archive is implicated in mechanisms of power which high-handedly demarcates the archive, defines its status and decides what should be excluded outside. The archive establishes a field of the utterance possibility and decides, in other words, what one can speak of and what one must pass over in silence. Is it then possible to stand up to this archival diktat, i.e. is it then possible to express that which has not been included in the archive or that which has been excluded and condemned to dumbness? If history was written only by the winners, it means that the voice of the oppressed could appear only in the writing of oppressors who thereby become paradoxical representatives of their victims. Referring to Jacques Derrida’s and Pascal Quignard’s works, I try to prove that archival diktat, however authoritarian it can be, doesn’t incapacitate the subject entirely. In their opinion (and from the point of Foucault’s view) the place where one can expresses that which can’t be expressed (and which is absent in the archive) is literature which becomes thereby an an-archival or even an-archic place par excellence . Literature becomes a place of an ethical gesture toward a bruised past, it takes the side of those who have been deprived of voice. One should, according to Walter Benjamin’s famous statement, “account for the truth, that nothing which has ever happened is to be given as lost to history”. Against dominative power we should oppose with the apologia of the harassed, inappreciable and defeated existence.

Etyka, hermeneutyka i myśl słaba. Vattimo, Rovatti, Dal / Ethics, Hermeneutics , and ‘Weak Thought’: Gianni Vattimo, Pier Aldo Rovatti, Alessandro Dal Lago

Summary As ethics has acquired an increasingly prominent place in modern hermeneutics, this article attempts to show how ethical aspects of a broadly conceived process of interpretation function in the area of ‘weak thought’ (pensiero debole), which is one of the main developments - not just in Italy - in contemporary hermeneutics. A discussion of the concept of communication (crucial in the hermeneutic ethics of the founder of the ‘weak thought’ Gianni Vattimo, but no less significant in the work of Heidegger, Derrida and Gadamer) is followed by an examination of the contributions of Pier Aldo Rovatti and Alessandro Dal Lago. The latter have developed a distinctly ethical strand of ‘weak thought’ by concentrating on the issues of subjectivity (‘weakening’ of the subject as an ethical gesture) and language (ethical relinquishment of the quest for an absolutely clear and unequivocal manner of expression in favour of eg. metaphors, especially in philosophical discourse).

Unsettling responsibility: postcolonial interventions

This paper contributes to debates about geographies of responsibility. In contrast to much of the previous literature in this field, which has concentrated on teasing out the intimate interconnections between different people, places and spaces, in this paper we highlight the limits to such connections, focusing on more unsettled versions of responsibility. Our critique draws on postcolonial readings to highlight two limitations of responsibility: its availability as an ethical gesture that can be ascribed even where it is not practised; and its imputed agency that makes it possible for responsible agency to be usurped by the global North. This starts to muddy the water of responsibility, showing how it may involve refusal, denial, withdrawal and contamination. More problematised enigmatic and risky versions of responsibility arise from these critiques. In particular, we argue that in considering responsibility as practice, a recognition of the provisional, contaminated and complex myriad of power relations involved may signal a move towards more ambivalent versions and visions that acknowledge the vulnerabilities and disconnections involved in geographies of responsibility.

Crimen Sollicitationis

Late modernity’s binary intrigue of child sexuality/abuse is understood as a backlash phenomenon reactive to a general trans‐Atlantic crisis concerning the interlocking of kinship, religion, gender, and sexuality. Tellingly dissociated from 1980s gay liberation and recent encounters between queer theory and kinship studies, the child abuse theme articulates modernity’s guarded axiom of tabooed incest and its projected contemporary predicament “after the orgy”—after the proclaimed disarticulation of religion‐motivated, kin‐pivoted, reproductivist, and gender‐rigid socialities. “Child sexual abuse” illustrates a general situation of decompensated nostalgia: an increasingly imminent loss of the child’s vital otherness is counterproductively embattled by the late modern overproduction of its banal difference, its status as “minor.” Attempts to humanize, reform, or otherwise moderate incest’s current “survivalist” and commemorative regime of subjectivation, whether by means of ethical, empirical, historical, critical, legal, or therapeutic gestures, typically trigger the latter’s panicked empiricism. Accordingly, most “critical” interventions, from feminist sociology and anthropology to critical legal studies, have largely been collusive with the backlash: rather than appraising the radical precariousness of incest’s ethogram of avoidance in the face of late modernity’s dispossessing analytics and semiotics, they tend to feed its state of ontological vertigo and consequently hyperextended, manneristic forensics.

Emmanuel Levinas and the Ontology of Eating

This essay examines the existential philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in relation to issues of food and eating. I argue that for Levinas, the act of eating is central to founding the ethical self, and that any understanding of Levinas's approach to embodiment must begin with what it means for us to ingest the outside world. Even in Levinas's earliest work, food is already a freighted ontological category. As his ideas mature, eating is transformed from the grounding for an ethical system to the system itself. The act of giving bread to another person takes its place as the ethical gesture par excellence. The story is not that we eat. The story is that we eat and develop a relationship to eating, and that relationship in turn helps determine our sense of ourselves in the world. Eating is the ethical event. The essay ends by asking how Levinas can help us answer the question, what would it mean to imagine every bite I take, or give to another, as a direct engagement with my own and my neighbor's existence?

Talking of mothers

The last three decades have witnessed the return of maternity as a central subject of discussion on our wider thinking. The effects of this proliferation of coverage are discussed, including the rise of maternal studies within the academy. Julia Kristeva's essay 'Motherhood Today' and Naomi Wolf's Misconceptions are analysed, which each identify motherhood as centrally involving an ethical gesture towards another. Motherhood is also described in its daily, messy, bodily practice of engagement. Alternative renditions of maternal experience are offered in order to illustrate the need for ways of dislodging 'mother-talk' from the twin poles of idealisation and denigration. 'Thinking maternally' also has a potentially interesting effect on the way we think about wider issues, including economics, value, labour and the environment.

Translating Fictions: The Messenger Was a Medium

In this article I will examine the ways in which the ethical gestures available to translators are inscribed in the etymologies of key terms and cognate pairs (especially in English and French) within the semantic field marked out by the category of translation: trade, transfer, transgress. translate / translater, traduire / traduce, betray / trahir. What emerges is a pattern dominated by themes of give and take, loss and gain, and above all, faithfulness and betrayal. Betrayal (like the French verb trahir) holds a pivotal position within this set, due to its two-faced character, given to both deceit and revelation. &#x0D; &#x0D; Juxtaposed on and rooted in these themes are the timeworn types in which translators have been chronically cast (when not simply ignored): the loser (mainly in the sense of the agent of loss) and the traitor. Such associations throw into stark relief the intrinsically political and ethical nature of the act of translation, which Lawrence Venuti and others have forcefully theorized and which the fate of translators in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, have brutally embodied in recent times. &#x0D; &#x0D; Drawing in part on my own thirty odd years as a translator of literary and non-literary texts, I will consider the implications of the figure of the translator as “double-agent” in the Canadian context, where a translation economy has grown against a backdrop of conflicts over loyalties and faithlessness. Furthermore, by way of dialoguing with Venuti’s project of “minoritizing translation,” I hypothesize a strategy of translators voluntarily affirming their “double-agency” or “traitorhood” as an additional challenge to prevailing textual and cultural assumptions and regimes.

Becoming Bare Life: Asylum, Hospitality, and the Politics of Encampment

This paper examines the politics of contemporary encampment within the UK with reference to the positioning of asylum seekers as a group subjected to a biopolitical logic of ‘compassionate repression’. The paper opens by examining the utility of presentations of the asylum seeker as an exemplar of Agamben's figure of the homo sacer. Drawing on recent critiques of the British government's apparent turn to a ‘deliberate policy of destitution’, I argue that through such acts of sovereign abandonment asylum seekers are relegated to a position reliant solely upon the ethical sensibilities of others. I then proceed to consider ways in which such a positioning ‘outside the law’ has been employed by asylum seekers and local campaigners to make ethical claims and demands upon the relational nature of the citizen as a figure of potential bare life. I then close by arguing that such an ethical gesture alone, of ‘assuming bare life’, is not enough and that the outright rejection of logics of distinction which Agamben suggests as a future politics offers little means to politically engage bare life beyond an irreconcilable ethic of the unconditionally hospitable. Opposed to this, I suggest the need to (re)engage with political theories which draw the political as always already an ethical practice in itself. Here, I examine the UK's involvement in the UNHCR Gateway Protection Programme, as an example of a conditional, and imperfect, act of hospitality, one grounded in distinction, yet one which holds both the risks of ethical practice and the possibility of political alteration at its heart.

The Body of the Friend and the Woman Writer: Katherine Philips's Absence from Alan Bray's The Friend (2003)

This article takes as its starting point the omission of Katherine Philips from Alan Bray's The Friend (2003), his important intervention in the histories of friendship and sexuality. It is an omission which poses the question of whether women's writing can be absorbed into existing narratives of literary and cultural history, or whether the attempt to include women's writing is more disruptive, requiring us to rethink not only the more orthodox narratives and periodizations of history, but their “oppositional” variants as well. Bray's persuasive narrative of radical change in the meaning of the body as signifier of (male) friendship prompts a rethinking of the relation of embodiment to the cultural capital of friendship in Philips's poems. In her poetry, Philips appropriates a male tradition of ethical friendship for women and for Royalist politics, but in ways which appeal to the passions and interests as capable of bringing about the erotic and political subjection of one woman to another. For Philips, as a woman writer, the difficulty lies not in the need to distinguish ethical bodily gestures from transgressive sexual ones, but in the claim that writings on female friendship can signify as ethical and political at all. So, for the history of female friendship and its poetry, the recovery of “the gift of the friend's body” may not be as important as the revolutionary upheaval that made it thinkable to deploy materialistic discourses of the passions and the interests in articulating a kind of libidinal economy of passionate obligation between women.

Gestures of work: Levinas and Hegel

What is Levinas's relation to Hegel, the thinker who seems to summarize everything which Levinas's philosophy opposes, yet with whom Levinas never enters a sustained philosophical engagement? An answer can be found through an analysis of the concept of work, understood both as activity of labor and product thereof. The concept of work reveals that, despite the apparent (but superficial) sense of opposition, Levinas's philosophy works in a deliberately noncommittal, or, to use a Levinasian expression, ``dis-interested'' mode with respect to Hegel. Such mode of disinterstedness expresses an ethical gesture of joyful hospitality that neither confirms nor refutes the German philosopher but rather opens him up to an eschatological dimension.