Ethical Turn Research Articles

Le « tournant éthique » de l’enseignement de la littérature : nouvel horizon ou demi-tour ?

Le sens du « tournant éthique » actuel de l’enseignement de la littérature se pose à cause de l’arrière-plan sociohistorique évoqué par tout croisement de l’enseignement de la littérature avec celui de la morale. Même mis à distance, cet arrière-plan peut influer à la fois sur l’épistémologie de la littérature comme objet enseigné et sur ses objectifs d’enseignement : s’achemine-t-on vers un enseignement de l’éthique par une littérature vassalisée à un autre objet qu’elle-même ou vers celui de la littérature prise comme source de questionnement éthique ? Ces deux axes sont-ils dissociables ?

Für eine meta-ethische Wende. Anmerkungen zur neueren Verantwortungsästhetik

Abstract Dating back to the early 2000s, a much discussed ‘ethical turn’ of the discourse of contemporary art has affected (and continues to infect) the entire field, from art practice, to curating, to criticism, to education, to the business of art. This turn – which arguably resumes one of the steadfast dialectical features of modernism as such – has caused deep schisms between defenders of art’s autonomy and those who see art as increasingly obliged to engage in moral, social, and political issues – due to claimed urgencies of the contemporary condition. The essay ponders various conceptual and philosophical underpinnings of this ethical conjuncture and makes a plea for an aesthetics of responsibility in opposition to the neoliberal responsibilization palpable in contemporary art and culture.

Radical educations in subjectivity: the convergence of psychotherapy, mysticism and Foucault’s ‘politics of ourselves’

ABSTRACTFoucault’s invitation to the subject is to become free of themselves by learning to think differently. Such a project has as its goal the mastery of the self, and can be understood as a Foucaultian ‘politics of ourselves’. Foucault’s ethical turn is an invitation for subjectivity to undertake its own radical education. Whilst this invitation has characteristics unique to Foucault’s philosophical discipline, I argue that it sheds light upon a diversity of practices of subjectivity from the psychotherapeutic and mystic traditions. By seeing these currently available technologies of self in the Foucaultian lens we are given the opportunity to appreciate their work on subjectivity as necessarily political and social, a radical education not limited to the realm of individualistic aspiration and narcissistic temptations. The paper concludes by drawing attention to some implications for education, and for a teacher education that embraces the ‘radical reflexivity’ of some psycho-spiritual practices.

The Anthropology of Ethics and Morality

Anthropologists have sustained a varied and active engagement with ethics throughout the field's history. In light of this long-standing engagement, what marks the distinctiveness of the current ethical turn? To think in Foucauldian terms, ethics/morality now looms large precisely because it has been problematized. Although there has been a recent outpouring of work on ethics, and a widely shared concern to move beyond overly collectivist accounts, much is nascent. Debates and schools of thought are still emerging. In this review article, we explore several resonate streams of disquiet or inspiration within the discipline that have generated new lines of inquiry. These include ( a) emerging debates and confusion around the use of basic terms such as “ethics” and “morality” and their role in debates over ordinary ethics, ( b) articulations of an anthropological virtue ethics (and the Foucault effect), ( c) increasingly sophisticated treatments of moral experience informed by philosophical phenomenology, and ( d) reinvigorated considerations of the political as connected to ethical life.

What Hippo and Grand Rapids Have to Say to Each Other

This essay situates James K. A. Smith’s Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology in the context of contemporary social criticism, Augustinian politics, and the cultural turn in religious ethics. While commending Smith’s liturgical ambitions and newfound appreciation for the democratic tradition, I raise critical questions pertaining to eschatology, war and nationhood, and the extent to which he overcomes familiar debates in Christian social ethics.

Just Use What You Have: Ethical Fashion Discourse and the Feminisation of Responsibility

ABSTRACTThe rise of fast fashion has meant that young women (even those on relatively low incomes) are able to ‘regularly consume and discard fashionable clothing’ [Buckley, Cheryl, and Hazel Clark. 2012. “Conceptualizing Fashion in Everyday Lives.” Design Issues 28 (4): 18–28. doi:10.1162/DESI_a_00172., 21]. While this development may be aligned with the democratisation of fashion—the fact that the supply chains that deliver fast fashion are not consistent with the principles of global democracy is now also relatively common knowledge in the democratised West. This, along with growing awareness of the ecological harms associated with the fashion industry has contributed to what Elke Gaugele [2014. Aesthetic Politics in Fashion. Vienna: Sternberg Press] has termed the ‘ethical turn’ in fashion. However, despite the fact that young women are often not deemed capable of translating their (ethical) attitudes into (ethical) behaviours [McNeill, Lisa, and Rebecca Moore. 2015. “Sustainable Fashion Consumption and the Fast Fashion Conundrum: Fashionable Consumers and Attitudes to Sustainability in Clothing Choice.” International Journal of Consumer Studies 39 (3): 212–222], nor able to be ‘trusted to consistently make good decisions’ [Brooks, Andrew. 2015. Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-Hand Clothes. London: Zed Books, 241], they are also increasingly being called to recognise their individual role in the politics of global fashion supply chains. Drawing on examples from scholarly and popular discourses as well as online peer to peer communications, this article explores the historical moment of fast fashion as an instance of both the feminisation of consumption and the feminisation of responsibility.

Critical realism and ICT4D research

AbstractThere is little overt engagement with research paradigms in ICT4D research, but what there is shows a dominance of positivism and interpretivism. In this paper, we explore the value of a “third way” research paradigm: critical realism. We concisely review the main features of critical realism: its ontological realism combined with epistemological relativism; its iterative, pluralist, and reflexive methodology; and its emancipatory values. Alongside the general value of explicit use of any research paradigm, we argue two particular types of value of critical realism for ICT4D research. First, generic values including exposure of context, a contingent causality that reflects real‐world ICT4D experiences, support for use of theoretical frames in ICT4D, legitimisation of different stakeholder views, and reduction of research bias and support for ICT4D's interventionist approach and its goal of delivering international development. Second, specific value in addressing current trends in ICT4D research: The growing search for causal links between “ICT” and “D,” and the political and ethical turns in ICT4D that are spurring researchers to engage more with issues of power, rights, and justice. But delivery of critical realism's utility will require the ICT4D research community to take actions that enable this emergent research paradigm to flourish.

Die Ausnahme bei Christian Garve und Søren Kierkegaard

Abstract Although people have established rules to secure their life and values, they seem to search—and to have searched, time and again, in the past—for exceptions to those rules, and this for different purposes. The article compares two concepts of exception, suggested by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling and by Garve in his Treatise on the Connection between Moral and Politics, respectively. A systematic-critical analysis shows certain intersections between their specific ways of handling the proposed exception. Garve’s concept of exception requires an original status naturalis between countries to increase happiness, and this is claimed by an established sovereign ruling with trust in God for his people. By contrast, the exception of Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical turns out, precisely by being based on an individual’s relationship with God, to be incommensurable with purportedly universal social, ethical and political standards. This notwithstanding, both conceptions build on the notion of a human existence, which is subject to and ultimately dependent upon no one except the immortal God.

Did Foucault do Ethics? The "Ethical Turn," Neoliberalism, and the Problem of Truth

This paper argues against a common misunderstanding of Foucault's work. Even after the release of his lectures at the Collège de France, which ran throughout the 1970s until his death in 1984, he is still often taken to have made an "ethical" turn toward the end of his life. As opposed to his genealogies of power published in the 1970s, which are relentlessly suspicious of claims of individual agency, his final monographs focus on the ethical self-formation of free individuals. I suggest that this basic misinterpretation makes possible interpretations of Foucault's work as being sympathetic to neoliberal government, by linking the ethical turn to a "liberal" or "neoliberal" turn in his thought. I present a case against the ethical turn by arguing that Foucault's main focus, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, is a concern for the ways in which we become obligated by truth.

Between Fraud and Hope: Stem Cell Research in Korea after the Hwang Affair

This study analyzed the influence of the Hwang scandal on the stem cell research community and research governance systems in South Korea. In contrast to the claims of some critics that the fraud scandal might raise doubts about Korean stem cell science, the impact of the Hwang scandal on publications by Korean stem cell researchers in international scientific journals proved limited, with only a temporary halt in research and publications. On the one hand, Korea’s scientific community has moved toward the ethical turn through which the Korean government tightened its research-ethics standards and regulations. On the other hand, the government and scientific community remain hopeful about stem cell research. Consequently, the politics of hope have led to the quick recovery of Korean stem cell science from the potential damage caused by the Hwang scandal. The scandal accelerated the South Korean government’s efforts toward research ethics reform: it mandated universities and research institutes to create and strengthen institutional review boards and other research-integrity committees. In addition, the Korean government, maintaining its optimism about the economic value of stem cell science, continued to fund stem cell research. Despite the seemingly prompt recovery from the scandal, however, stem cell research governance systems in Korea face a serious new challenge: the ethical and safety concerns associated with the rapid commercialization of stem cell science. Therefore, this article views the changes in the scientific community as a process of conflict and negotiation between the accountability crisis in the Korean scientific community and the politics of hope in science.

O giro ético da estética e da política na contemporaneidade a partir de Jacques Rancière

Este artigo pretende pensar o que Rancière chama de “giro ético da estética e da política” (le tournant éthique), isto é, a eticização contemporânea desses campos. Em Malaise dans l’esthétique o filósofo francês pretende mostrar como a palavra “estética” suscita atualmente sempre um certo incômodo, certa animosidade, tomada como um discurso capcioso pelo qual uma certa filosofia teria desviado em benefício próprio os sentidos das obras de arte e dos julgamentos de gosto. Em oposição a isso é que se teriam lançado alguns autores que denunciam certa “confusão” estética e tentam “consertá-la”, como Bourdieu, Badiou e Lyotard. É esse conserto que tende a uma eticização da estética e, com ela, da política. Acusa-se a estética de ser culpada de abrigar o ‘não importa que’ dos objetos de uso e das imagens da vida profana; e, também, de se ter extraviado em promessas falaciosas de um absoluto filosófico e de uma revolução social. Num tempo da arte pós-utópica, portanto, a única salvação, o único Deus disposto a nos salvar, estaria a cargo de uma ética, de uma arte marcada pelas categorias do consenso, isto é, disposta a restaurar o sentido perdido de um mundo comum ou reparar as falhas do laço social. O conceito de comunidade é aqui central para se pensar como a comunidade política é transformada em uma comunidade ética. Se para alguns autores a relação entre essas duas comunidades é de continuidade, para Rancière elas revelam diferenças significativas, regidas pela oposição entre povo e população. Para a investigação que desenvolvo sobre o lugar da educação como questão filosófico-política o “giro ético da estética e da política” é um passo importante para se pensar nas formas contemporâneas de subsunção do espaço político e nas consequências desse processo para a educação.

Between Plenitude and Responsibility: Notes on Ethics and Contemporary Literature

This article moves from the observation that one of the key characteristics of contemporary Italian fiction is a preoccupation with ethics and more specifically with the issues raised by the “ethical turn” in contemporary philosophy and theory. Current literary criticism, it is argued, has been slow to respond to the ethical dimension of these narratives whose innovative and important cultural contribution has yet to be fully appreciated. It is therefore necessary to develop a keener sensitivity to the ethical discourses developed in these literary texts, but this can only be achieved by first confronting some fundamental questions about the relationship between ethics and literature today. The answers to these questions make it possible to elaborate an initial conceptual framework that can re-orient reading and enable the critic to respond adequately to the ethical issues raised in and by the narrative. Accordingly, in this article the author proposes to explore from a theoretical perspective the relationship between ethics and literature in the context of the historical and philosophical predicaments of contemporary society. The discussion is divided into two parts: the first is devoted to an exploration of contemporary ethical thinking, and the second on the contribution that literature can make to that thinking. In the first part, the author proposes an approach to ethics based on the virtue tradition which, since Aristotle, has defined ethics as the search for "the good life." This tradition, however, is transformed through an engagement with the work of Gilles Deleuze and Immanuel Levinas. From Deleuze the author draws the idea that the good life is one devoted to pursuing human plenitude through the multiplication of connections and intensities. From Levinas, on the other hand, emerges a powerfully haunting description of an ethical life marked by absolute responsibility for and obligation to the other. These two seemingly opposed views are not construed as irreconcilable and contradictory but rather as vectors which keep opposing tensions in check and ultimately define a necessary negotiation between the desire for human plenitude and the acknowledgement of responsibility for other human and non human life. Ultimately my argument is that such tensions establish the ethical terrain in which contemporary narratives seek to intervene. In the second part of the article, the nature and possibilities of such an intervention are explored through six theses which provocatively articulate the relationship between literature and ethics. The cornerstone thesis is that literature is an encounter. Each subsequent thesis endeavours to develop this initial assertion and explore its consequences. The theses are accompanied by a gloss which unfolds its meaning and significance: the answers that the given thesis provides but also the questions that it raises. Together, the theses provide a heuristic framework for a literary criticism sensitive to ethical issues and therefore capable of grappling with the important cultural work carried out in fictions that have struggled to receive the recognition they deserve.

From moral facts to human finitude: On the problem of freedom in the anthropology of ethics

The ethical turn in anthropology was to a large extent premised on a decisive break with Durkheimian “unfreedom.” This essay explores the theoretical condition in which this break has left the proj...

Beginnings

Beginnings

Re-framing Vulnerability and Wound Ethics: Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary

ABSTRACTIn keeping with the current ethical turn in humanities, this paper analyses Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary as a literary testimony of post-Levinasian relationality. Such relationality – whereby the One and the Other both meet, ‘emasculate’ and give meaning to each other – draws on vulnerability. That is, the novella shows that to be human is to be exposed and vulnerable to the Other. This is not necessarily negative because such exposure relies on the ethics of care that Mary performs particularly with her neighbour Farina, her cousin Mary, Jesus and Lazarus. Indeed, the wounds both men suffer are not only traumatic symptoms, but also relational meeting points. Hence, the article proves that wound ethics (vulnerability being the etymological root of the wound) is recast into interpersonal care to re-present the encounter with the Other.

‘Why Read Literature?’: Appeasing the Appetite for Play

ABSTRACTThis article begins by questioning the ethical turn in literary studies (Hillis Miller, Attridge) and suggests that this redirection has tended to downplay the importance of what Friedrich Schiller had labelled ‘the play-drive’ (Spieltrieb). Drawing on neuroscientist Jaak Panskepp's findings concerning the primacy of the play instincts, the article focuses on Wolfgang Iser's ‘literary anthropology’ and a theory of reading that can describe games played by authors and readers in what, following Freud, may be called a ‘playground’ (Tummelplatz). Iser's concepts ‘the fictive’ and ‘the imaginary’ are then placed alongside traditional concepts from play theory to explore an extract from Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye in which the protagonist plays with and dismembers a doll. This analysis appropriates, in particular, Iser's ideas in order to highlight the fundamentally playful nature of our engagement with literature.

Ética y política en la teoría epistemológica del "marco" de Butler

El ensayo intenta mostrar de qué modo, en la obra de Butler, se podría pensar que la aprehensión de una vida está ligada a las condiciones de posibilidad del conocimiento que la legitiman. A partir de esa relación, procuramos abordar la noción de marco como una problemática epistemológica que implica considerar a las normas de reconocimientos como éticas y políticas. A los efectos de delimitar esta relación, contrastaremos los alcances del análisis butleriano con la propuesta biopolítica de Michel Foucault. Además, pretendemos explicar cómo el concepto de marco evidencia el legado posestructuralista en el giro ético de Butler.

“So He Who Strongly Feels, Behaves”: Marianne Moore’s Ethical Detail

In August 1943, Marianne Moore delivered a lecture at the then displaced annual international symposium Entretiens de Pontigny. Hosted at Mount Holyoke College and convened by the exiled French philosopher Jean Wahl, Pontigny-en-Amerique was a highly charged occasion at which the relation of intellectual life to global political crisis was unavoidably at issue. Moore's contribution to the proceedings, Feeling and Precision,proved a defining statement of her compositional principles. Situating Moore's statement in relation to the inquiry Wahl set out to develop through the symposium, this essay uses the terms established in Feeling and Precision to recalibrate the ethical turn Moore's poetry took during and after the Second World War. Drawing on the lecture's emphasis on the compulsion to unbearable accuracy, the essay traces the transition from the commitment to fastidiousness that characterized her early poetry, to the conscious detail, ethics, Jean Wahl, Pontigny, witness. development of a capacity for witness that became her postwar concern.

Walking Borders: Explorations of Aesthetics in Ephemeral Arts Activism for Asylum Seeker Rights

Australia’s Operation Sovereign Borders vehemently enforces closed borders to asylum seekers arriving by boat to Australia. Policed urban borders were enforced in Brisbane, Australia, during the G20 Summit in 2014, to protect visiting dignitaries from potential violent protest. The ephemeral arts intervention Walking Borders: Arts activism for refugee and asylum seeker rights symbolically confronted border politics by peacefully protesting against Australian immigration policy. Rather than focusing on the direct effects of the ephemeral arts intervention, this article attends to the affective workings of the aesthetic elements of the project through sensory ethnography and storying. Informed by Ranciere’s aesthetics of politics, this article explores the affective experience and potential educative gains of the ethical turn attended to in participatory arts such as ephemeral arts interventions.

Failing well

Since the early 1970s, the small town of Mayapur in West Bengal has been home to a multinational Gaudiya Vaishnava community of International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) devotees, popularly known as the Hare Krishnas. Although the land of Mayapur is understood to be sacred and therefore conducive to spiritual life, devotees often struggle with the practices and prohibitions that are deemed indispensable for their salvation. They are also, however, both prone to and adept at articulating their inability to live up to the ideals of Krishna consciousness, so much so that narrating failure itself becomes a privileged mode of moral self-cultivation. Devotees inhabit the moral system not simply by conforming to a set of Vaishnava ideals but by articulating their failure to do so consistently within Vaishnava moral narratives that account for the aperture between precept and practice. In other words, they inhabit the moral system by failing well. This article contributes to recent debates in the ethical turn that center on the twin problems of identifying and locating ethics. I suggest that beyond a focus on virtue, the anthropology of ethics must also account for how people relate to vices, and how moral systems accommodate the problem of moral failure.