Reading Unruly: Interpretation and Its Ethical Demands

Conclusion: Unruly Theory

149 Conclusion Unruly Theory Theory does not contain answers to everything; it reacts to the world, which is faulty to the core. What would be free from the spell of the world is not under theory’s jurisdiction. Theodor Adorno Unruly works are things of this world; yet, at the same time, they resist the meaning the world ascribes to them. They impose their own demands on the worldofreaders,interruptingtheflowofknowledgeandcommentary.Attempts at comprehending the unruly—the elusive otherness of an artwork—often meet with a barrier. The negotiation with the unruly and response to its barrier constitute the ethical scene of reading. In “Compassion and Terror,” Martha Nussbaum frames the encounter with otherness in terms of a cosmopolitan ethics, an ethics that underscores “compassionate imagining” as an antidote to the confines and comfort brought about by the nation-state. As an alternative to narcissistic investment in one’s own country and culture, Nussbaum advocates for “an education in common human weakness and vulnerability,” through which “students should learn to decode the suffering of others, and this decoding should deliberately lead them into lives both near and far, including the lives of distant humans and the lives of animals.”1 Nussbaum is certainly not naïve about the difficulties in realizing this ideal; she is quite aware of the dangers in grounding an ethics in the self’s capacity to imagine and capture the suffering of others. She repeatedly acknowledges the dilemmas of interpretation and the double aim 150 Conclusion of her readings: recognizing otherness and understanding the other. As she argues in Love’s Knowledge, “[Literary] stories cultivate our ability to see and care for particulars, not as representatives of a law, but as what they themselves are: to respond vigorously with senses and emotions before the new; to care deeply about chance happenings in the world, rather than fortify ourselves against them.”2 Accordingly, ethical criticism cannot proceed by merely applying a preexisting rule or law; it requires a care for particulars, a care for that which cannot be reduced to an example of a rule. Yet criticism must at the same time strive to recognize the exemplarity of the particular, to be attentive to its potential to yield “moral truth.”3 Indeed, criticism must endeavor to understand/decipher the particular rather than stress its unknowability or otherness: We always risk error in bringing a distant person close to us; we ignore differences of language and of cultural context, and the manifold ways in which these differences shape one’s inner world. But there are dangers in any act of imagining, and we should not let these particular dangers cause us to admit defeat prematurely, surrendering before an allegedly insuperable barrier of otherness.4 What is at stake here is not simply the feasibility of overcoming the other’s otherness, but also the desirability of transcending the other’s difference as an ethical goal. The passage opens with a call for hesitation and recognition: the self is not the other and the other is not the self. Readers risk moral failure unless they both admit the limits of the self and recognize the linguistic and cultural differences of the other. The first ethico-interpretive injunction is not to cannibalize the other, or in its positive formulation, to respect the other’s recalcitrant difference. Yet the passage ends with another warning, a second injunction: do not be seduced by the otherness of the other, or positively stated (the result of a double negation as it were), cannibalize that otherness—for the sake of understanding, that is, in order to make emphatic imaginings happen. To sum up Nussbaum’s argument: too much attention to difference risks fetishizing the border that separates the self and the other. What sets up this quasi-reversal of focus (from not enough difference to too much otherness) is the idea of “one’s shared inner world.” The use of the pronoun “one” here serves a double function. First, it ontologically harmonizes the self’s separation from the other; that is, although we may be separated by language and culture, we still share the same humanity, the same experiential 151 Conclusion makeup. Second, it provides the necessary rationale for the call to overcome “the barrier of otherness.” For Nussbaum, ethics and otherness arethus locked together in an unhappy dialectic. Knowledge of the other will necessarily be imperfect—hence the importance of hesitation as one proceeds...