Ethics Of Desire Research Articles

The Reintroduction of Ethics to Eighteenth‐Century Literary Studies

AbstractThe 1980s and 1990s witnessed a ‘turn to ethics’ in literary criticism in general and in criticism of the literature of the long 18th century in particular. Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep was instrumental in turning our attention to the relationship between books and readers, a relationship that he figured as a ‘friendship’ with the kinds of ethical demands that attend all friendships. A highly regarded work, Company influenced subsequent studies, such as my Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth‐Century Comic Fiction, but it was not until critics such as Melvyn New and Donald Wehrs began to situate literary analysis in terms drawn from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas that ‘ethical criticism’ of the field would become an identifiable ‘school’ of 18th‐century studies. Building on, but diverging from, the political emphases of race, class, and gender, ethical critics insist on the ‘otherness’ of the text and its resistance to our ideologies and assumptions. My Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, for example, reads the works of women writers as statements of ethical agency rather than as evidence of political objectification. Edward Tomarken’s Genre and Ethics similarly attends to the voices of literary works in their own contexts, meeting them face‐to‐face (in Levinasian terms) before asking questions regarding political implications or assumptions. The ‘turn to ethics’ is not a turn away from politics, however, for the impact of the ethical encounter will have real‐world consequences. Therefore, ecocriticism and disability studies are likely to become growth areas in 18th‐century ethical readings in the near future as these concerns surfaced in the period itself and are two subjects that dominate our own social, political, and ethical lives as well.

Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684-1814: In the Voice of Our Biblical Mothers (review)

Reviewed by: Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684-1814: In the Voice of Our Biblical Mothers Jesse Molesworth Elizabeth Kraft , Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684–1814: In the Voice of Our Biblical Mothers. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. vii + 199. Elizabeth Kraft's book defends a thesis that, on the face of it, seems absurd: the amorous fictions of women writers like Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood, which created scandal in their own day, have at their core a strong ethical component, one that is absorbed and re-articulated in later fictions by Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Smith, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald. Instead of tantalizing and titillating, such matriarchs of the English novel — increasingly seen as feminine counterparts to the patriarchal triad of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding — were articulating a specifically feminine form of desire, which is responsive to the demands of an other. Within an exchange of "double desire," such writers therefore anticipate the ethical utopia envisioned later by, for example, Immanuel Kant: a realm of universal subjectivity, free from the dehumanizing force of objectification. If these women could not find a reasonable model of ethical desire within the writings of contemporary men, Kraft argues, they did have models within Scripture. Turning especially to three Biblical women — Sarah, Rebecca, and the anonymous speaker of the Song of Songs — Kraft traces what she describes as a feminine erotics, which refuses the possessive inequalities of male desire. Sarah's enigmatic laugh within the tent of Abraham, for example, is shown to represent "the gift of laughter and joy in love" (20). Rebecca's marriage to Isaac embodies an ideal, in which "self and other meet without possession" (27). And the speaker of the Song of Songs possesses the freedom and individuality to speak openly "of mutual passion and of sexual difference and of transcendence through erotic love" (29). Taken as a threesome, such women exemplify a desire that is redemptive rather than demeaning. According to the theory of Emmanuel Levinas, the philosopher whose ethical writings underpin Kraft's book, desire offers a means of experiencing the infinite — but only when it is "chiastic," symmetrically overlapping in the manner of a Greek "X." Some of the best moments in the book come as Kraft, aided by commentary from Luce Irigaray, traces the ramifications of this chiastic desire: "the point of crossing is really a moment of surrender, an admission of inadequacy or vulnerability, in which one voice demands of the other voice 'interrupt me'" (26). The bulk of the book extends this examination of chiastic desire to the case of the eighteenth-century novel, more particularly to works written by women about women. (The only exception is a brief look at Richardson's novels, which are seemingly too important to ignore — but even this discussion focuses strongly [End Page 409] on female reactions to his work.) The analysis, which is often quite illuminating, proceeds by viewing certain Biblical heroines as antecedents, or in Kraft's words "paradigms," for heroines of the long eighteenth century. Thus, Deborah, the paradigmatic woman of politics, models the political struggles of Isabella within Behn's "History of the Nun." Esther, the great interpreter of signs, models the type of "hieroglyphics of desire" found within works by Manley and Haywood. Hagar's sufferings model those of Ellis within Burney's The Wanderer. And Lot's daughters, who find themselves in an erotic quagmire, model the situation faced by Miss Milner and her daughter Matilda in Inchbald's A Simple Story. The argument is not that Biblical texts were directly influential: "The older texts are not mined as source material, but are invoked as records that speak to perennial concerns, especially about love, sexual desire, and spiritual longing" (1). This assertion will no doubt invite methodological questions: could not the links be drawn more strongly, perhaps by demonstrating the cultural capital of Biblical narratives as a model for ethical thought? And, if these ethical concerns are "perennial," especially for women, then do they not compromise the uniqueness of the answers offered by such writers? But such questions may misread the intentions of the project, and the present reviewer, for...

ELIZABETH KRAFT. Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684-1814: In the Voice of Our Biblical Mothers.

ELIZABETH KRAFT. Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684-1814: In the Voice of Our Biblical Mothers.

Dissertations Recently Completed in Related Fields

Dissertations Recently Completed in Related Fields Thanks to Prof. Jonathan Erlen of the University of Pittsburgh for this listing. Bonnett, Laura L. "Transgressing the Public/Private Divide: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Citizenship Claims in Alberta, 1968-1998." PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2006. Pp. 331. Borland, Jennifer Regan. "Unstable Women: Transgression and Corporeal Experience in Twelfth-Century Visual Culture." PhD diss., Stanford University, 2006. Pp. 264. Brandzel, Amy Lucinda. "Queering the Subject(s) of Citizenship: Beyond the Normative Citizen in Law and History." PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2006. Pp. 226. Byars, Jana L. "Concubines and Concubinage in Early Modern Venice." PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2006. Pp. 235. Chalfant, Rhonda. "The Midland's Most Notorious: Prostitution in Sedalia, Missouri, 1867-1900." PhD diss., University of Missouri, Columbia, 2005. Pp. 278. Chi, Ta-Wei. "Ethics of Desire: Sexual Alterity in Twentieth-Century Chinese-Language Fiction." PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2006. Pp. 265. Crammer, Margaret Corinne. "Woman's Place: The Difference between the Sexes in the Theology of Han Urs von Balthasar." PhD diss., Emory University, 2006. Pp. 244. Edwards, Suzanne M. "Beyond Raptus: Pedagogies and Fantasies of Sexual Violence in Late-Medieval England." PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2006. Pp. 253. Feldman, Susan. "The Shadow of Difference: Sex, Race, and the Unconscious." PhD diss., University of New York, Buffalo, 2006. Pp. 218. Garrison, Denise Rose. "Revolutionary Men: Gender and the War for Independence, 1760-1825." PhD diss., University of California, Riverside, 2006. Pp. 229. [End Page 351] Gross, Elizabeth Anne. "Domestic Agents: Women, War, and Literature in Early Modern England." PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2006. Pp. 275. Hall, David Miles. "The Politics of Same-Sex Marriage in the 2004 Presidential Election." PhD diss., Widener University, 2006. Pp. 129. Hartlen, Neil C. "Queer across the Atlantic: Homo/sexual Representation in the United States and France, 1977-2001." PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2006. Pp. 324. Horan, Marion. "Trafficking in Danger: Working-Class Women and Narratives of Sexual Danger in English and United States Anti-Prostitution Campaigns, 1875-1914." PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 2006. Pp. 345. Ipsen, Avaren E. "Sex Worker Standpoint and Sacred Text." PhD diss., Graduate Theological Union, 2006. Pp. 290. Korpela, Craig. "The Cover-Up Is More Damaging than the Sin: Sexual Scandals at the Cabinet and Sub-cabinet Levels." PhD diss., Western Michigan University, 2006. Pp. 292. Limoncelli, Stephanie A. "The Politics of Humanitarianism: States, Reformers, and the International Movement to Combat the Traffic in Women, 1875-1960." PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2006. Pp. 200. Lorencova, Viera. "Becoming Visible: Queer in Postsocialist Slovakia." PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2006. Pp. 496. Lucas, Cassandra Lynn. "Rape, Race, and Redemption: A Northern Translation of the Southern Script in the 1920 Duluth Lynching." PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2007. Pp. 234. Lynn, Denise M. "Women on the March: Gender and Anti-fascism in American Communism, 1935-1939." PhD diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 2006. Pp. 260. Massey, Preston T. "The Veil and the Voice: A Study of Female Beauty and Male Attraction in Ancient Greece." PhD diss., Indiana University, 2006. Pp. 381. Morales, Michele Elaine. "Persistent Pathologies: The Odd Coupling of Alcoholism and Homosexuality in the Discourses of Twentieth-Century Science." PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2006. Pp. 216. Nadkarni, Asha. "Reproductive Nationalism: Eugenic Feminist Literature in the United States and India." PhD diss., Brown University, 2006. Pp. 243. Peters, Wendy Kathleen. "Our Televisions, Our Selves: Popular (In)visibility, Marginalized Identities and the Politics of 'Queer as Folk.'" PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2006. Pp. 302. Ray, Carina E. "Policing Sexual Boundaries: The Politics of Race in Colonial Ghana." PhD diss., Cornell University, 2007. Pp. 345. [End Page 352] Rhyne, Ragan. "Pink Dollars: Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals and the Economy of Visibility." PhD diss., New York University, 2007. Pp. 311. Romesburg, Don Alan. "Arrested Development: Homosexuality, Gender, and American Adolescence, 1890-1930." PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2006. Pp. 421. Rousseau, Nicole. "A Historical Materialist Analysis of the Commodification of Black Women's Biological Reproduction in the United States." PhD diss., Howard University, 2006. Pp. 165. Ryan, Kelly Alisa. "Regulating Passion...

Women novelists and the ethics of desire, 1684-1814: in the voice of our biblical mothers

In Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684-1814, Elizabeth Kraft radically alters our conventional views of early women novelists by taking seriously their representations of female desire. To this end, she reads the fiction of Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Eliza Haywood, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Smith, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald in light of ethical paradigms drawn from biblical texts about women and desire. Like their paradigmatic foremothers, these early women novelists create female characters who demonstrate subjectivity and responsibility for the other even as they grapple with the exigencies imposed on them by circumstance and convention. Kraft's study, informed by ethical theorists such as Emmanuel Levinas and Luce Irigaray, is remarkable in its juxtaposition of narratives from ancient and early modern times. These pairings enable Kraft to demonstrate not only the centrality of female desire in eighteenth-century culture and literature but its ethical importance as well.

주체화와 정신분석의 윤리

주체화와 정신분석의 윤리

Need or Desire?

This paper explores the significative structure and normative quality of the child wish by focusing on the concepts that are used when people speak about it Does having children belong to the category of human needs, or is it rather something that people desire? The Principle of Precedence holds that needs tend to have a substantially greater moral impact than desires. In order to do justice both to people's profound happiness that goes with fulfilment of the child wish and to the great distress that goes with involuntary childlessness it seems to be right then to argue that having children belongs to the category of human needs; and to use the term from Harry Frankfurt, to the category of constrained volitional needs. Accordingly, it might be argued that society has a rights-based duty to prevent involuntary childlessness. Contrary to this, I defend the thesis that an ethics of desire, which conceives the child wish as rooted in a symbolic desire, leads to a more adequate understanding of the child wish in all its various phenomenological aspects.

Wit and The Spectator's Ethics of Desire

An ethical analysis is particularly apt for explaining sites of contested values. The Spectator papers demonstrate the term "wit" to be such a site, revealing rather than resolving the various cultural demands, energies, and desires attached to language in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In his extended series on wit, Joseph Addison fuses politics, epistemology, and aesthetics in the value-laden discourse that is the tool as well as the product of internalized regulation, but as he does so he also reveals the power and appeal of the habits of mind and language he is attempting to discredit and replace.

Jo Ann Cavallo. Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato: An Ethics of Desire. Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993. xi + 206 pp. $34.50.

Jo Ann Cavallo. Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato: An Ethics of Desire. Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993. xi + 206 pp. $34.50. - Volume 48 Issue 4

Lacan and the Ethics of Desire: The Relation Between Desire and Action

Lacan and the Ethics of Desire: The Relation Between Desire and Action

John Stuart Mill and Experiments in Living

Previous articleNext article No AccessJohn Stuart Mill and Experiments in LivingElizabeth S. AndersonElizabeth S. Anderson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 102, Number 1Oct., 1991 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/293367 Views: 169Total views on this site Citations: 27Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1991 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Aylon R. Manor Transformative Experimentation, Perspectival Diversity, and the Polycentric Liberal Order, Res Publica 28, no.22 (Sep 2021): 323–338.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-021-09528-xJoshua Isaac Fox Two Pessimisms in Mill, Utilitas 33, no.44 (Jun 2021): 442–457.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820821000212Sina Fazelpour, Zachary C. Lipton, David Danks Algorithmic Fairness and the Situated Dynamics of Justice, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 81 (Oct 2021): 1–17.https://doi.org/10.1017/can.2021.24Robert Mark Simpson ‘Lost, Enfeebled, and Deprived of Its Vital Effect’: Mill’s Exaggerated View of the Relation Between Conflict and Vitality, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 95, no.11 (Jul 2021): 97–114.https://doi.org/10.1093/arisup/akab006Gregory Robson The rationality of political experimentation, Politics, Philosophy & Economics 20, no.11 (Sep 2020): 67–98.https://doi.org/10.1177/1470594X20949937Marco Mariotti, Roberto Veneziani The Liberal Ethics of Non-Interference, British Journal of Political Science 50, no.22 (Dec 2017): 567–584.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123417000576Lisa Herzog, Bernardo Zacka Fieldwork in Political Theory: Five Arguments for an Ethnographic Sensibility, British Journal of Political Science 49, no.22 (Jun 2017): 763–784.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123416000703Richard Sturn Endogenous Power and Crises of the Liberal Order, Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch 139, no.2-42-4 (Apr 2019): 385–406.https://doi.org/10.3790/schm.139.2-4.385Menaka Philips Troubling appropriations: JS Mill, liberalism, and the virtues of uncertainty, European Journal of Political Theory 18, no.11 (Feb 2016): 68–88.https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885116631201Nizar Hariri Mill’s qualitative hedonism as an ethics of desire, (Jul 2018): 40–53.https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315113258-4Stephen Darwall Mill II, (Apr 2018): 123–138.https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429498350-13Samuel Clark Mill's Autobiography as Literature, (Apr 2018): 45–57.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118736739.ch4Sally Haslanger Racism, Ideology, and Social Movements, Res Philosophica 94, no.11 (Jan 2017): 1–22.https://doi.org/10.11612/resphil.1547Ben Saunders Recent Critics of Mill's Qualitative Hedonism, Philosophy 91, no.44 (Sep 2016): 503–521.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819116000437Joel Marks Desire and Reason, (Sep 2016): 91–133.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43799-6_3Jeff Frank Love and Growth: On One Aspect of James Baldwin's Significance for Education, Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education 117, no.99 (Sep 2015): 1–38.https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811511700906RYAN MULDOON Expanding the Justificatory Framework of Mill's Experiments in Living, Utilitas 27, no.22 (Feb 2015): 179–194.https://doi.org/10.1017/S095382081400034XLIZ MCKINNELL ‘A medicine for my state of mind’: The Role of Wordsworth in John Stuart Mill's Moral and Psychological Development, Utilitas 27, no.11 (Feb 2015): 43–60.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820814000302KRISTIN SCHAUPP Books before Chocolate? The Insufficiency of Mill's Evidence for Higher Pleasures, Utilitas 25, no.22 (May 2013): 266–276.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820812000593 Ethics I (1900–45), (Oct 2012): 113–132.https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203030684-12 Mill's Theory of Value, (Feb 2008): 117–138.https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470776483.ch9 by Robert Sugden Opportunity as a Space for Individuality: Its Value and the Impossibility of Measuring It Sugden, Ethics 113, no.44 (Jul 2015): 783–809.https://doi.org/10.1086/373953Don A. Habibi Mill’s Moral Philosophy, (Jan 2001): 62–116.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2010-6_3DANIEL JACOBSON Mill on Liberty, Speech, and the Free Society, Philosophy <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&"/> Public Affairs 29, no.33 (Jul 2000): 276–309.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.2000.00276.xGeoffrey Scarre Happiness for the millian, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7, no.33 (Oct 1999): 491–502.https://doi.org/10.1080/09608789908571041Robert E. Goodin Democracy, preferences and paternalism, Policy Sciences 26, no.33 (Jan 1993): 229–247.https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00999718P. J. Kelly The J. S. Mill Bibliography: Recent Additions, Utilitas 4, no.11 (Jan 2009): 196–197.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0953820800004490

Ethics and desire.

Cyrano de Bergerac is alive and well. Whether with the Royal Shakespeare Company in England or with the Tyrone Guthrie Repertory Theater in Minneapolis, he is alive and doing famously. This romantic tale tells the outlandish story of the Gascon soldier-swordsman-poet-lover-who, because of his felt ugliness (that monstrous ithyphallic nose!), dared not declare his passionate love for his cousin, Roxanne, directly, but only through a handsome though inarticulate other (named Christian) for whom Cyrano's poetic flair supplied the words of romantic ardor. Clearly it is the tale of the impossible dream, of unrequited love, of frustrated desire in someone whose only comfort is the wave of a "white plume" at the moment of death (which in the French original is simply panache). And yet this unlikely hero is alive and well. As Anthony Burgess, current translator of the Rostand text, put it when the play opened in New York: "He is one of the rare personages of literature who seems to stand outside the proscenium arch or book-covers which enclose him. Like Falstaff or Don Quixote or Leopold Bloom. Apparently we need him, or he wouldn't be strutting and fretting on Broadway" (New York Times, Nov. 18, 1984). What do we need him for? Certainly not as a role model[ And yetthe idea may be worth some thought. Cyrano de Bergerac may be the last of the great troubadours, and Jacques Lacan, in developing what he calls the "ethics of psychoanalysis," does so under theguise of an "ethics of desire," for which the courtly love of the troubadours, with all its illusion and fantasy, supplies a kind of paradigm. At any rate, for heuristic purposes let us take Cyrano's quest for the object of desire as a starting point in order to help us understand what Lacan means by saying that the ethics of psychoanalysis is radically an ethics of desire. Lacan formulates his conception of an "ethics" for psychoanalysis most succinctly in the final session of his year-long series of seminars entitled "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis" (1959-1960). Let it be clear from the beginning, however, that an "ethics of psychoanalysis" here does not pretend to be a general ethics that psychoanalysis proposes for Everyman-it is only an ethics for psychoanalysis insofar as it pertains to the psychoanalytic