Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (review)

Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s collection of essays, Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society, is an important contribution to literature and ethics, a field of rising interest. The book’s several arguments take the reader through a vast amount of material by way of some rather surprising combinations: Martha Nussbaum and pederasty, game theory and Freud’s Rat Man, and Kant and the Gulf War, to name a few. Beneath this surface variety, however, there are significant unifying structures and thematics. The book is divided roughly into three parts. The first third opens with an introductory essay that seeks to articulate the relationship between literary experience and the “pursuit of a broadly humanist agenda” (1), then moves forward with a set of essays that tracks the history of ethics in literary criticism and offers a defense of the readerly principles of “attention and nonassertion” exemplified in Derrida. In the second third, the book turns to a set of essays that examine the co-implication of opposites and the burden of structural undecidability in a series of key conceptual pairings: the Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment, rationality and irrationality, aesthetics and ideology. Harpham’s method here is an extension of his conception of ethics as the “hub from which various discourses, concepts, terms, energies fan out and at which they meet, crossing out of themselves to encounter the other, all the others” (37). The last third of the book offers a lively series of intellectual portraits designed to illuminate the contemporary critical scene (Fredric Jameson, Geoffrey Hartman, Martha Nussbaum, and Noam Chomsky) and culminates in a final provocative essay that criticizes what Harpham sees as the “flight from ethics” and “marginal thinking” (261) of post-Foucauldian cultural theorists like Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Judith Butler. “I am . . . urging thinkers” today, Harpham writes in the rhetoric of reform, “not to discover some more effective means of resisting power or normative configurations but to begin forming some other, more familiar, confident, and productive relations with them” (261).

The book is engagingly written and helps to bring fresh, intelligent attention to enduring questions. Harpham’s handling of interdisciplinary materials is deft and convincing. If the book has a weakness, it is that its essays sometimes appear to rely upon a defunct surprise-effect once generable from the revelation that presumed opposites share certain key features. At its best, however, the book combines the suppleness of theoretical self-questioning with the jagged edges of unflinching critique.