The Limits of the Ethical Turn: Troping towards the Other, Yann Martel, and Self
The moral law is not certain of itself.
Frantz Fanon, 55
Ethics is how we inhabit uncertainty, together.
Brian Massumi, 43
I
The turn to ethics in literary and critical studies has long been a regular move, albeit a move that has taken on different guises – some very apparent, some less so, yet others so subtle or disguised they could hardly be discerned as relevant to ethics at all. Certain kinds of postcolonial and diaspora studies, with their concern for subjectivities that have been subjugated and marginalized, are a case in point for a turn to ethics that is both evident and credible. Consider, too, the ethical turns in philosophy, such as those by Emmanuel Levinas, John Rawls, and Charles Taylor, that demonstrate an abiding interest in what constitutes our relationship with and recognition of the other. Or similar turns in the arenas of political theory and cultural anthropology – the work of Hannah Arendt and, more recently, Chantal Mouffe, and James Clifford would be three examples – that reflect a persistent concern with the effects of fascism, hegemony, complicity with discrimination and racism, or the politics emerging from our entanglements with foreign cultures, globalization, and democracy. All these are sustained, and in many respects agonistic, instances of ethical studies that disavow deleterious ideologies and abominable social practices, that expose biases in disciplinary and pedagogical structures and methods that are prejudicial towards the other, that work towards articulating how we can understand, respect, and live with others. Take, though, literary theory, especially the kind that has developed from poststructuralism, with its interest in how meaning is produced, and all hell breaks loose. Despite, or perhaps because of, the paradigm shifts it has brought about, theory has been seen as the worst case of intellectual foolery or obscurantism, a rebuff to fundamental values, a travesty of ethics; rejected and ridiculed for its affront to reality and referentiality by many, it has also been credited by as many for being immensely enabling in, say, unsettling illusory fixities about subjectivity or showing that the meaning [End Page 937] of literary texts is not as innocent as we had thought it to be. If literary theory marks, at least when viewed in certain ways, a critical turn towards ethics, then the large spectrum of possible responses to its relationship to the ethical typifies the ambivalence characterizing as much what constitutes ethics as what the turn to ethics entails.
A turn to ethics is not an ethical act by default. It is a critical gesture, critical in the entire range of the semantics and etymology of the word: to discern faults; to judge, as to decide a dispute and pass sentence upon; to examine, as to interpret; to acknowledge a quandary or predicament; to confront a turning point, to face up to a crisis.1 In this light, a turn to ethics can be a response to some kind of a Mayday call, a perceived zero hour, or a step towards identifying a crisis in values, a critical manoeuvre towards re-envisaging different ways of coming to terms with the intricacies and vicissitudes of the human condition. If such a gesture is to have any efficacy, it demands not only a prompt response to a dilemma or conflict, but also vigilance lest we miss the call for the methodological shifts that it might be necessary to implement before we can act ethically. Because ethical predicaments do not exclusively arise from distinct actions, but often materialize as a result of the methods and practices we employ as readers, scholars, and teachers, responding to the responsibility to do the right thing in our profession should always entail the readiness to question – indeed revise, and, if need be, dismantle and reinvent – our established modes of reading and terms of engagement. For no turn...
