The Ethics of Criticism

ELT: Volume 33:1, 1990 and reasoned argument about essential issues of our reading experience . His voice is that of a traditional humanist inquiring about why and how we read; he is committed to reading as an essential activity and passionate in his enthusiasm for books that he admires. Sometimes he can be engagingly ingenuous as when he tells us why he has changed his mind about Lawrence: [Rleading him, I find myself conversing with a peculiarly insistent, intent, passionate, and wide-ranging friend, one who will respond in some interesting way to every important question I can think of. . . . His quest to make a larger self that would really respect the Other— including the others who represent Him or It—is to me one of the most impressive efforts at religious fiction of this century, at least in English. . . . What I am impressed by is Lawrence's capacity to dramatize rival positions ... oppositions that become emotionally and psy chologically plausible and engaging because of the author's vigorous penetration of the souls of those whose stories he tells. No matter how disarming its tone, and no matter how familiar Booth is with language, such criticism is somewhat subjective. Yet perhaps at times because of Booth's magisterial intelligence we give him permission to generalize without full evidence. Thus within one paragraph three sentences begin with the following sweeping—and not fully argued—assertions: "Many thinkers have seen Western individualism. . . . Indeed, many of the classics of our literature. . . . Many of our most powerful moral heroes in literature." But notwithstanding that quibble, Booth's new book is a splendid contribution to the current revival of humanistic approaches to literature that is accelerating because qf the de Man scandal. Daniel R. Schwarz Cornell University The Ethics of Criticism Tobin Siebers. The Ethics of Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. χ + 246 pp. $29.95 POST-STRUCTURALIST THEORY IN FRANCE has often invoked the term ethics—for example, Kristeva's "The Ethics of Linguistics" and Lacan's L'Ethique de la psychanalyse. Lately the term has become prominent as well in American literary criticism, J. Hillis Miller's The Ethics of Reading, itself influenced by French post-structuralism, being only the most salient example. Though Tobin Siebers does not engage at length with such competing uses of the word ethics, he 130 Book Reviews seeks in The Ethics of Criticism to reclaim ethics for humanist criticism . More specifically, Siebers wishes to reassert the primacy of what he calls "the human" over "the linguistic," which serves, in his argument, as its binary opposite. Yet this book is no simple-minded trashing of post-structuralism (or what Siebers calls "linguistic pluralism ") in the name of a more traditional Anglo-American humanism. Unlike many self-styled humanists, Siebers does not dismiss deconstruction (whether Derridian or de ManÃ-an) as amoral or immoral— that is, as inherently unethical. Indeed, the greater part of his project with respect to these theorists (so often anathematized by those who proclaim the moral value of literature and criticism) is to demonstrate that the concerns motivating their theoretical positions are precisely ethical. Ethics, in Siebers's use of the term, addresses "the role of the human in literature and criticism" and concerns itself with conflict and violence (and by extension, victimization and marginalization) as forces that rend human communities and threaten life. To demonstrate the ethical basis of criticism, Siebers draws upon various scenes in the western philosophical tradition that have animated twentiethcentury literary theory and shaped the thinking of some of its most significant exponents. Thus his second chapter traces a trajectory from Plato through moments in Aristotle, Kant, and the Romantics to "pluralism." "Pluralism," his index makes clear—though his argument does not spell out this distinction as clearly as it might—enters modern theory in two varieties: "human" (good) and "linguistic" (bad). His model of human pluralism is Kant's "refusfal] to conceive of freedom apart from human activity and willing"; for linguistic pluralism , by contrast, freedom is irreducible polysemy, Derrida's "differance ," the "free play" of language. Siebers objects to this variety of pluralism (a term Kristeva, Derrida, and his other "linguistic pluraliste " would surely reject) because in "permit...