Ethics Of Reading Research Articles

Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies by Celine Parreñas Shimizu (review)

Reviewed by: Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies by Celine Parreñas Shimizu Harrod J. Suarez (bio) Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies, by Celine Parreñas Shimizu. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012. xiii + 296 pp. $22.95 paper. ISBN: 9780804773010. Han Lee, the Korean American owner of the Williamsburg Diner in the current prime-time CBS sitcom Two Broke Girls, plays a key role in the negative reviews the show has received. In "Yo, Is This Racist? 2 Broke Girls and the New Long Duk Dong We Never Asked For," blogger Andrew Ti writes that Lee is a "tiny, greedy, sexless man-child" who fulfills "every possible Yellow Panic stereotype with an actually fairly impressive level of thoroughness."1 Ti attempts to account for the long history of racist depictions of Asian Americans, but by generalizing Lee's masculinity, he appears to exclude and dismiss other powerful stereotypes, such as those that construct Asian American femininity. The strategy is hardly new: How often have similar attempts to critique racialized masculinity depended on marking femininity, and homosexuality, as forgettable and otherwise undesirable positions? Is there anything to be gotten from "asking for" Long Duk Dong, the stereotypical Asian immigrant character from the 1984 hit film Sixteen Candles, whom Ti cites as an antecedent for Lee? Is it possible to construct alternative racial, gender, and sexual identities that do not unwittingly reinforce whiteness and heteronormativity? As Celine Parreñas Shimizu asks, "Is the sex act political for the Asian man because he is no longer sexually absent? But what comprises his sexual presence?" (174, emphasis added). [End Page 128] Shimizu's new monograph, Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies, argues for a critical attention to negative and undesirable cinematic representations of Asian American masculinity. Rather than dismiss such representations for inhabiting a gender and sexual lack that defines Asian racialization, she contends that more is at stake—namely, these portrayals provide the means to construct an ethical manhood not dependent on control and domination, the very terms of racialized heteronormativity. A politics grounded in what she calls "straitjacket sexuality"—the set of norms that discipline Asian American masculinity as sexless, emasculated, and passive—is insufficient and, more to the point, dangerous. Many of us have been trained to bemoan Long Duk Dong, for instance, for serving as the racial, nonmasculine other to one of the film's main characters, Jake Ryan, "the ideal white male" (117). But while recognizing the historical and cultural contexts for stereotypical characterization is important, it also forecloses an alternative ethical reading Shimizu reveals. While we want to see Long Duk Dong rebel against the racism he faces, he "carves out his own space, derives pleasure, and achieves recognition where there was . . . pain and misrecognition" (121). The point, which might seem counterintuitive, is crucial within the current moment of Asian American studies and its affiliations with feminist and queer theory. Shimizu writes that we need "to advocate a masculinity that criticizes rather than emulates the one that deems [Asian American men] inadequate" (84). Racialized heteronormativity, it appears, is most dangerous not when it is imposed by dominant others but when it is internalized and reproduced within Asian American critical responses. We might not have put the straitjacket on, but we help perpetuate its constricting bondage. We tighten the straps. For Shimizu, films are not merely a case study; indeed, they play a constitutive role in shaping alternative ethical relations that can help "to remap what is valued in our society" (9, emphasis original). Many of the Asian American male characters she examines deliver a care for others that detractors find simply pathetic and emasculating. James Bond's heroic masculinity, for instance, is defined not by compassion but by sexual conquest, standing in sharp contrast to the characters Bruce Lee played that afford the possibility of "empathizing with others who occupy [different] structural positions" (5) precisely because normative masculinity is out of reach. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy on the alterity of the face that renders the self vulnerable, she privileges vulnerability and lack. Shimizu writes about how recognizing our vulnerability can lead us beyond...

Why computer games can be essential for human flourishing

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to argue that playing computer games for lengthy periods of time, even in a manner that will force the player to forgo certain other activities normally seen as more important, can be an integral part of human flourishing.Design/methodology/approachThe authors' claim is based on a modern reading of Aristotle'sNichomacean Ethics. It should be emphasized that the authors do not argue that computer gaming and other similar online activities are central to all people under all circumstances; but only seek to show that the claim holds true for some people under some circumstances and the authors try to spell out the relevant circumstances in detail.FindingsThe authors provide a list of situations in which playing computer games for lengthy periods of time, in a manner that will force the player to forgo certain other activities normally seen as more important, is an integral part of human flourishing.Originality/valueThe paper puts some novel pressure on the widely‐held belief that playing computer games for lengthy periods of time, in a manner that will force the player to forgo certain other activities normally seen as more important. The paper claims that playing some computer games and partaking in some forms of online activities could be highly conducive to what it actually means in practice to take care of oneself and, to paraphrase Aristotle, to be eager for fine actions.

Bethan Benwell, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson, eds. Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers, and Reception.

Bethan Benwell, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson, eds. Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers, and Reception.

Reframing the Business Case for Diversity: A Values and Virtues Perspective

We provide an ethical evaluation of the debate on managing diversity within teams and organizations between equality and business case scholars. Our core assertion is that equality and business case perspectives on diversity from an ethical reading appear stuck as they are based on two different moral perspectives that are difficult to reconcile with each other. More specifically, we point out how the arguments of equality scholars correspond with moral reasoning grounded in deontology, whereas the foundations of the business case perspective are crafted by utilitarian arguments. We show that the problems associated with each diversity perspective correspond with the traditional concerns with the two moral perspectives. To resolve this stalemate position, we argue that the equality versus business case debate needs to be approached from a third, less well-known moral perspective (i.e. virtue ethics). We posit that a focus on virtues can enhance equality by reducing prejudice and illustrate this by applying it to the HRM domains of recruitment and selection and of performance management. Subsequently, we argue that values are key to aligning virtues with each other and with corporate strategy, delineate our values and virtues perspective on diversity, and argue why and how it can enhance organizational performance.

Sobre a tarefa da desconstrução e a questão do fundamento negativado: por uma ética da finitude

Abstract In this paper we shall analyze the possibility of an ethical reading in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. We shall show in what form the theoretical horizon of Sein und Zeit permits us to think an original Ethics, an Ethics of being-in-the-world the base of which can be no other than human finitude.

Reading Deliriously

This short piece argues that the demands of reading globally should change how we approach conversations about the ethical reading of minoritarian literature. Rather than assume a stable relationship between the imagined reader as subject and the text as object, we should consider how texts now participate in multiple cultures that trouble the boundaries between domestic and foreign, “us” and “them.” Reading deliriously outlines an approach to reading that values transnational circuits of comparison and aggregation for the way they might reconstruct the imagined reader as a navigator of world literary space rather than a protocitizen of world community. Instead of focusing on molding better citizens through reading, this piece calls for an ethics of global reading that reconsiders and expands the number of cultural systems and traditions from which the possibilities for belonging might emerge.

Cultivating Oneself after the Images of Sages: Another Version of Ethical Personalism

Countering the general reading of Confucian ethics as a form of virtue ethics or humanistic ethics, this essay reads Confucian ethics as a form of ethical personalism. Doing so, it examines the ethical orientations in the Confucian classics, The Analects, Da Xue, and others, pointing out that the touchstone concept of Confucian ethics taught in these classics is the person, recalling the Confucian motto of ethical cultivation, ‘inner sagehood and outer kinghood’. It demonstrates that only the name of personalism describes well the substance of Confucian ethics and captures its essence. It indicates that Confucian personalism is characterized by its starting not from the concept of the person or personhood as a divinely or naturally given, something akin to the Hindu Atman, but from the concept of the person or personhood that must be substantialized in ethical cultivation, e.g., cultivating a personhood after the image of the sage.

The affective turn: The ambivalence of biopolitics within modern labour and management

This paper confronts biopolitics with modern labour addressing questions of ‘governmentality’, ‘self-management’ and ‘social innovation’. It argues that the new modes of production within immaterial labour involve a new complex relation between on the one hand the ‘Art of Governance’ (Governmentality) related to different forms of control, and on the other hand new modes of existences connected to co-operation, social innovation and experimental projects. The paper then argues for a more positive conception of biopolitics using self-management as a strategy since it is through self-management that human individuation ties together modes of productions with affects and emotions. Introducing Spinoza's concept of ‘affect’, and Gilles Deleuze's reading of Spinoza's ethics focusing on the ‘affective turn’ in relation to the new economy and society, the paper argues for a more positive notion of biopolitics that surpasses that of governmentality. The affective self-relation is used as a research tool to analyse the creation of social and economic values in our new modes of productions, for instance, within free labour of the cultural industry. The movie The Five Obstructions is used to show how organizing good affective encounters based on limitations enhance and facilitate the performative dimension of self-management. Finally, the paper addresses the problem of critique confronting self-relation with Spinoza's ethics as an ethical difference of power.

Receptive human virtues: a new reading of Jonathan Edwards's ethics

Receptive human virtues: a new reading of Jonathan Edwards's ethics

Developing wisdom and moral duty in management

PurposeThe primary purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the writings of Aristotle and Cicero can be used to as a conceptual tool to promote an understanding of wisdom, moral duty, and related subjects in respect to contemporary business management practice.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology comprised a critical reading and analysis of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics and Cicero's De Officiis (On Duties). The approach combines both historical and philosophical research. An earlier version of the paper was presented to a group of early/middle managers, and then to a group of more senior/experienced managers.FindingsBoth groups supported the idea that the article was appropriate for highlighting moral issues in contemporary business management practice.Research limitations/implicationsA limitation was dealing with the amount of material that Aristotle and Cicero produced. A secondary limitation was translating the original Greek and Latin (notwithstanding the Loeb Classical Library) into understandable everyday English.Practical implicationsDeveloping understanding of concepts, such as wisdom, moral duty, and related subjects should be included in MBA programs.Originality/valueThe paper has value because: it relates concepts and ideas conceived in Aristotle's and Cicero's time to contemporary management practice, and it illustrates that these ideas are still relevant and applicable in the modern business environment.

Ethics with Barth: God, Metaphysics and Morals. By MATTHEW ROSE. * Christian Ethics as Witness: Barth's Ethics for a World at Risk. By DAVID HADDORFF.

‘The human soul is Christian by nature’ writes Matthew Rose (p. 1). However, ‘[h]uman beings simply cannot ask themselves the question to which God is the answer’ (p. 127). What seems like a paradox is consciously chosen as the theological foundation of Rose's monograph on Barth's ethics. This dissertation from the University of Chicago is one of several recent Roman Catholic discussions of Barth's ethics of creation. The Thomist thinker first describes Barth's fundamental dogmatic commitments and spells out their ethical implications in order to present Barth's ethics of creation in CD III/4. Rose repeatedly maintains that the revelation in Christ is the revelation of God, of God's law, of creation, and of humanity, and not the other way around. Clinging to this revelation, however, the analysis of creation can ‘ascend … from the cave to the divine light’ (p. 49). This would be impossible if creation were not ‘ordered to God’ (ibid.). Humanity now appears fundamentally relational, which constitutes an analogy to God's relational being. Rose can corroborate many of these claims with references to CD III/1–3. While his reading of Barth's ethics in II/2 is fairly selective, he does not aim at a complete vindication of Barth's thought. Nonetheless, he proposes combining the relational concept with Barth's notion of ‘the humanity of God’ as revealed in Christ, pointing to an ‘anthropological turn’ (p. 106) in Barth's theology that rests on metaphysical presuppositions. God's eternal aseity does not mean rivalry with creation. The created order should be highlighted precisely because it is grounded in God's sovereign, free decision for creation. Due to the eternal love of the omnipotent God, creation rests on solid ground in the face of temporal distortions.

Ethical Readings of Student Texts: Attending to Process and the Production of Identity in Classroom-Based Literacy Research

This paper highlights multimodal literacy activities that invited the social re/positioning of learners as creators of meaning and experience rather than passive readers of text. Elaborating two cases, the paper describes the ways in which newcomer students’ identities were negotiated and enacted during the project, and how their identities were read and constructed by teachers in the classroom. The paper recommends an analytic approach to literacy studies research that accounts for the ways in which literate identities are materialized in classrooms, and the value in documenting both the product and process of students’ literacy work.

<i>The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England Emily Steiner Kate Crassons. The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. 432. ISBN: 9780268023027. US$40.00 (cloth). In an age of global economies and Internet technologies, we are made constantly aware of poverty around the world and the difficult choices we face in responding to it. Medieval European writers understood as well as anyone the ethical complexities of poverty. In The Claims of Poverty, Kate Crassons examines the literature of poverty in England, from the 1370s to the 1430s, focusing on socially conscious non-Chaucerian literature: Piers Plowman, Pierce the Plowman's Crede, Wycliffite sermons, The Book of Margery Kempe, and the York cycle plays. Crassons is an expert in this literature, as well as in the medieval debates about poverty from which it draws, and the many modern studies on the subject, by David Aers, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Anne Middleton, Anne Scott, Derek Pearsall, and others. What makes Crassons's book new and thought [End Page 78] provoking is her acute, often agonized sense of the difficulty of interpreting the signs of poverty. At the heart of Crassons's study is the question, "Who are ethical readers and writers?" For Crassons, ethical readers and writers embrace the "fundamental ambiguity" of poverty: They contend with the irreducibility of signs but strive to overcome ambiguity and irreducibility in order to address the needs of the poor. Ethical readers and writers also understand the conflicted nature of contemporary moral solutions. They acknowledge the difficulty of doing the right thing, but they observe how the language of poverty is co-opted by those whose primary concern is not with improving the lives of the poor. For Crassons, the best example of ethical reading and writing is William Langland's Piers Plowman. Piers Plowman may be steeped in major debates about the legitimacy of religious mendicancy and the virtues of labor, but the poet doesn't chase polemics. Instead, as Crassons explains in chapter 1, "Forms of Need," he views poverty without blinders, precisely because, as a poet, he revels in the difficulty of representing need. As Crassons argues, Langland understands that "need," whether it refers to empty bellies before the harvest or friars begging for alms, is a concept that tips over into excess (31). And those who speak for and about neediness, almsgiving, moderation, and the poor, as Holy Church and Patience do, are never fully in control of their discourse. Crassons's real contribution to Piers Plowman studies, however, is not her analysis of the poem's indeterminacy but, rather, her focus on discernment, how the poem goes about perceiving need and portraying "non-scrupulous empathy" with those perceived to be needy. The key moment of discernment in the poem is the Good Samaritan's encounter in C.19 with semivif, the man attacked by thieves and left for dead. Another critical moment of discernment is the conversation between the dreamer and Need at the beginning of C.22, a reflexive passage that dramatizes the subject's relationship to an other. Finally, as Crassons argues, two important passages introduced by Langland in his C-revision, the portrait of poor laborers in C.9 and the interrogation of the dreamer in C.5, together disclose two crucial facts about poverty: first, that the concealment of need is one of poverty's main characteristics and, second, that the challenge of literature is to discern that need. In chapters 2 and 3 Crassons takes to task several reformist works that don't measure up to Piers Plowman as examples of ethical writing. In chapter 2, Crassons argues that Pierce the Plowman's Crede, though ostensibly concerned with the plight of the poor, sells out real thought about poverty to antifraternalist polemic, that is, to the criticism of those who assume poverty as part of their spiritual profession but who [End Page 79] overcompensate for their own need. By resorting to antifraternalist polemic, the poet fails to represent the complexities of discerning real need; worse, he produces a "deliberately impoverished poetics" (137), which rejects poetic forms...

'Burns and Byron in Scottish, British and European Romanticism' The Byron Centre, University of Manchester 4–5 December 2010

In light of the fact that most of Western Europe had been brought to a standstill in the week immediately prior to the conference, it is a miracle that so many participants actually managed to get to Manchester at all. Interestingly, those who failed the snow challenge were all from other parts of the UK - a triumph for UK public transport and public services! The conference organisers, Gerry Carruthers (Glasgow) and Alan Rawes (Manchester), seemed quite unfazed by the impact of the weather, although we suspect that they were secretly more than a little worried about whether anyone would still be able to make it. This took nothing away from the enthusiasm of the participants and rather promoted a sense of victory over the snow. Located in the historic Samuel Alexander Building, the conference was a collaboration between The Byron Centre at the University of Manchester and the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow. It opened on Saturday morning with the first plenary, given by Professor Murray Pittock (Glasgow) and entitled 'The Real Language of Men: fa's speerin?', which offered a lucid close reading of, among other texts, Burns's 'To a Mouse' and 'To a Louse', focusing on their use of idiolects and dialects from a historical and political perspective, and on the particular power of the poems' language. After a coffee break, the first set of parallel sessions commenced. In 'Burns, Byron and Scotland', chaired by Gerry Carruthers, Colin Clark (Charles, Prague) presented his paper, 'Hell's Hot Jurisdiction: Byron, Burns and the Poetics of Transgression and Transcendence'. This unravelled the complexities of the Calvinist literary legacy in various well-known works by Burns and Byron. Inspired by the portraits of Burns and Scott (both freemasons) and Byron and Shakespeare (neither normally linked with freemasonry) hanging in the lodge room of Lodge Canongate Kilwinning, Andrew Prescott (Glasgow) then explored some interesting connections between Burns and Byron and freemasonry in his wide-ranging paper, 'Annexing Reputation: the Masonic Reputations of Byron and Burns'. The other parallel session, 'Burns and Byron in British Romanticism', chaired by Alan Rawes, was marked by the first arctic-weather absence, that of Will Bowers (Oxford), whose paper would have been on 'Byron, Hunt and the Genesis of the Italian Fashion'. Peter Francev (Mount San Antonio College) was present, and spoke on 'Byron and the Mistress Poem', discussing the question of whether Teresa Guiccioli was or was not a source of inspiration for Byron's poetry, looking closely at works such as 'Stanzas to the Po', 'Stornelli' and 'The Prophecy of Dante'. The session then closed with Adam White (Manchester), whose paper, 'Burns, Byron and John Clare', argued that Clare drew on the lyric poetry of Burns and Byron to construct a haunting, complex and mysterious female figure through which to imaginatively explore farflung, exotic places. The second plenary speaker of the day, Brean Hammond (Nottingham), scheduled for after lunch, was defeated by the Nottinghamshire snow, but his paper was not. It was very competently delivered by Alan Rawes. Entitled 'The Ethical Turn in Literary Criticism: Burns and Byron', Hammond's paper examined the issue of ethical reading in relation to the problematic cases of Burns and Byron - two poets who have often been seen as unethical in both their lives and work. To explore notions of the performativity of the self and its aversiveness, and how these fit with the idea of poetic truth in both Burns and Byron, Hammond gave an insightful analysis of 'Ae Fond Kiss' and 'So We'll Go No More A-Roving', to the musical accompaniment of Leonard Cohen's husky rendering of the latter. The afternoon tea and coffee break was followed by two more parallel sessions: one dealing with 'Burns, Byron and Romantic Celebrity' and the other with 'Burns, Byron and other European Writers'. In the Romantic celebrity session, chaired by Murray Pittock, Hannah Doherty (Stanford) opened with a paper on 'Byronic Advertising: Selling Romanticism in the Early Nineteenth Century', which explored the many ways in which Byron's name was put to use for publicity purposes during the latter part of his life, highlighting especially the political associations evoked by its eclectic use. …

Hurled into the Heart of Darkness: Moral Luck and the Hebrew Literature of the Intifada

This paper proposes an ethical reading of literary works that describe the Israeli soldier in the Intifada. It examines the experiences of Israeli soldiers, the nature of the situation, and the protagonist's choices and identity, in the light of the philosophical concept of moral luck (following Nagel's categories), which is generally defined as a state where a moral agent is assigned moral blame or praise for an action even though a significant part of what he does depends on factors beyond his control. Reading representative works, I show that the Israeli soldiers in many literary works find themselves in a state of bad moral luck that is both circumstantial (stemming from the Occupation) and constitutive (stemming from the military socialization process). By covering moral and immoral protagonists, realistic and non-realistic prose, the paper examines the reflection of the complexity of the conflict and the place of the individual in a situation of national and political dispute.

Of a complex sensitivity in marketing ethics education

This paper scrutinises the way in which ethics is taught in the modern marketing syllabus. Our intention is to open up a space within which to promote timely debate on contemporary marketing education. Specifically, we wish to ask whether the tutor's role as a conduit of apparent ethical knowledge to students has somehow failed to map with sufficient sensitivity the terrain of the moral impulse in business practice. Drawing on literature from educational philosophy and the work of Emmanuel Levinas, we argue that the conceptualisation of ethics in marketing cannot be divorced from the question of pedagogy and the responsibilities of the tutor. This reading of ethics in marketing leads us to suggest that the largely conventional model adopted for the teaching of marketing may be unsatisfactory. Whilst current approaches may provide students with a prescribed set of knowledge and skills, it may by the same token refuse us the moral education that seems to be necessary. The significance for the teaching of ethics in an atmosphere punctuated with the discourses of economic crisis is acknowledged. We call for a reappraisal of the tutor/student relationship such that we may facilitate a greater understanding of how marketing students can make sense of themselves and of ‘the Other’. To begin the process of articulation, we offer an example drawn from nursing education. Through this, we consider the requirements of the capable moral educator and offer initial practical suggestions on how this could be incorporated within teaching.

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.

Ethical doings in naturecultures

What new forms of ethical engagement are emerging in naturecultural worlds? In this paper I explore the example of the practical ethics of the permaculture movement. I put these in dialogue first with new approaches to ethics in biopolitics and naturecultures and second with a reading of feminist care ethics. Across this discussion I focus on the potential of ethos transformations experienced through everyday doings to promote ethical obligations of care. If we are living in a naturecultural world where politics and ethics conflate in biopolitics, the permaculture movement is an example of an alter-biopolitical intervention. It works within bios with an ethics of collective empowerment that puts caring at the heart of its search of alternatives for hopeful flourishing for all beings.

‘The discipline of the question’: Rereading Derrida's ‘Violence and Metaphysics’

This article recalls Derrida's reading of Levinasian ethics as a discourse of the other, particularly in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in order to re-elaborate Derrida's own account of the other's heterogeneity, notably in light of critiques of deconstruction's thinking of difference, alterity, and the unconditional. At stake here is the precise meaning of what may be termed wholly other; or, better still, the specific nature of the arguments about the question of the other from among Derrida's earlier texts, which must be recalled amidst any appeal to absolute alterity, especially of the kind frequently found in Derrida commentary today. The article suggests that, in the process of Derrida reading Levinas, the radical alterity of the other is sustained in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ principally in terms of the legitimacy (or ‘discipline’) of a question that arises only on the hither side of a phenomenology of the other – a phenomenology that emerges, nonetheless, as its unacknowledged ground. Thus, in contrast to Levinasian thought (and yet also in deeper affinity with what we might term, for Derrida, its still obscured originality), deconstruction's discourse of the other opens onto the wholly other not simply as the ‘beyond’ or the ‘outside’ of phenomenology's limits, but only at the point where the phenomenological gives way in something like a double sense.

The History of the Future

Looking back recently at my professional career, I was struck by fact that, excepting my season as a graduate student and my current appointment at Columbia, I have been in departments of Romance languages or Romance studies and was even chair of one such department for rive years at University of Pennsylvania before coming to this campus. I am convinced that I am a better scholar for it: if nothing else, relativization of one's own discipline through frequent contact with other fields that are structurally related to it both formally and historically keeps you from fetishizing preconceptions and rituals that define it, which is a salutary state of affairs. Nevertheless, in my intervention in a conference titled Return to History and Future of Romance Studies, I would like to argue that, precisely because of to history, there is no future for Romance studies, and that this development is to be neither mourned nor resisted. I could engage in a fairly run-of-the mill and perhaps even predictable reading of phrase the return to in order to evince an essential ambiguity at its core; in fact, I have not managed to resist temptation to do so. On one hand, expression refers to a disciplinary praxis centered on history as ultimate context of study, as against a previous practice which return to history is supposed to have displaced or superseded, that is, linguistic in which almost everyone in this audience--including me--was both formed intellectually and went on to contribute to as a scholar. This is probably sense in which organizing committee intended it to be understood by audience: that is, as recent troping away from language and text to either materiality or ideology that bas been subsumed under capacious mantle of term cultural studies. On other hand, there is a somewhat hortatory, vaguely ethical reading of phrase the return to that appears to carry within it an injunction to reinscribe ourselves and our practice once again in history after a season of having turned our back to it; that is to say, to acknowledge historical determinants of our profession and corresponding contingency of what we do--the equivalent of Jameson's famous imperative to always historicize now applied to our own intellectual and academic praxis. Now these two meanings are discontinuous with one another and may even be antithetical. The turn to may be seeking to provide a description of what is our current critical praxis or its horizon of expectations, but second acceptation of expression reveals that very praxis to be a historically contingent affair. In other words, contemporary to history described by first meaning is immediately rendered suspect when considered from directive to return to a historically inflected understanding of our activity. Hence, phrase seems to enjoin us both to engage in practice of turning to history as final horizon of what we do and to simultaneously challenge practice by underscoring its historical contingency. The constant oscillation from description to prescription in possible interpretations of phrase are not auspicious, for a constructivist outlook has unfortunate tendency to temper enthusiasm required to engage wholeheartedly in any activity. If we look at our own metier from perspective of suspicion required by directive to historicize, another question forces itself on us: How does one return to history? Or better yet, when were we ever out of history? The linguistic that return to history is supposed to have displaced was itself a historically conditioned event, and recent enjoining to return to history is historically conditioned as well. Hence, we should perhaps dwell not on what is most intellectually rigorous way to return to history in our critical praxis, but rather on what are contemporary historical circumstances that make it feel like a peremptory assignment. …