In this chapter I want to turn back to some of the issues I began with, back, that is, to what might be considered the “burning” question of ethical thought, the question of universality.1 It was the concept of universality , after all, that Hegel addressed when he came to consider the dialectic of human and divine laws in his discussion of the Ethical Community in his Phenomenology,2 and it continues to smolder despite the twentiethcentury ’s attempts to “overcome” the great dialectician. The concept of universality has been the target of some of the most sophisticated critiques of contemporary thought and would seem, by now, to have been securely relegated to the ashes of history as embodying the most egregious excesses of nineteenth-century imperialist and totalizing impulses. The universal, it is now assured, is dead: discredited as a concept, and routed from its historic pride of place on the shrine of ethical discourse. Replacing it of course, in a swing typical of such discourse’s dialectical progression, is the concept of particularity or, as it is more commonly called, “difference.” Difference has long come to dominate contemporary ethical discussions, embodying now the touchstone for ethical action and judgment. Since the great Hegelian “overcoming” represented, culturally, by the new historicism and, philosophically, by deconstruction, ethics has become the ethics of the particular, specifically of the rights of particulars to differ from the all-encompassing, hegemonic Same. The problem, however, as has been recognized recently by some of the same theorists who originally proclaimed the death of the universal, is 99 3 Lighting a Candle to Infinity “The Altar of the Dead” that without some workable concept of universality ethics dissolves into mere cultural relativism and the “free play” of endless, metonymic slippage .3 Without some unifying or, better, limiting principle, in other words, judgment (the basis for ethical action) becomes impossible. The question now becomes how to resurrect the concept of universality, but without repeating the excesses and violent impositions that this concept historically has invoked. Can we have a universal that is not inherently totalizing? Does the concept of universality always necessarily ultimately imply the (surreptitious and illicit) dominance of one particular at the exclusion of another? Henry James’s, “The Altar of the Dead,”4 seems an appropriate place to continue sounding out these questions since, like Hegel’s chapter on the Ethical World where the question of the “being” of universality and individuality is first raised, the tale similarly deals with the problem of burial, more specifically, of marking a place for the dead. Although unlike Antigone, who is the central feature in Hegel’s discussion, the woman in James’s story is neither burying her brother, nor breaking state laws to do so, she nevertheless shares with the Sophoclean heroine a conviction regarding what she considers the appropriate memorial rites to be. Indeed, for both women, it is not so much a question of what is appropriate , but rather of what must be done. Each woman, in other words, holds the question of what to do with the dead as possessing a uniquely ethical urgency, an urgency that for us at a first glance might seem excessive . Why should the question of the rites/rights of the dead carry such import to the extent that, at least since Hegel’s Antigone, they have come to epitomize for us what is essential to ethics? James’s tale gives us some answers. The story is told through the eyes of the male character, George Stransom, for whom the rights of the dead also matter very intensely. They matter so much in fact for Stransom that he dedicates his life to remembering or memorializing his Dead, at first through intrinsic and later extrinsic means. It is Stransom, as Andrzej Warminski helps us to see in his superb analysis of the tale,5 who shows us what is at stake in the funereal rites of death. For it is as a consummate dialectician, Warminski argues, that Stransom sets up his altar of the dead, with the aim not of repressing death but of turning it over to the service of life, that is, to dialectize it in a manner reminiscent of Hegel’s own “tarrying with the negative.” “Death,” as Hegel famously puts it in his preface (but worth citing once more), 100 Acting Beautifully [44.201.94.1] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:03 GMT) if that is what we want to call this non-actuality...