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

Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society by Geoffrey Harpham. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv + 263. $54.95 cloth; $19.95 paper.

If you are of the party that believes that most writing on ethics is plagued by a self-congratulatory earnestness, then this is the book for you. Shadows of Ethics is a rich, elegant work with a skeptical sensibility and a wonderful sense of proportion. Defining ethics as "the site of a desire for a clean conscience" (xiii), Geoffrey Harpham argues for the unsurpassability of the Kantian imperative (even in many who claim to disdain it), the impossibility of fulfilling that imperative, and the undesirability of taking it too literally.

This argument is not made in a direct or repetitive way throughout the book, which is a series of thirteen discrete essays, nine of which have been previously published. The connections between chapters are often oblique, and many of the individual chapters stand alone quite well, particularly the critiques of individual writers and the essay on Enlightenment and modernity. The book's second chapter, "Ethics in Literary Study," will be the most familiar to many readers, having appeared as the entry on "Ethics" in the Lentricchia/McLaughlin collection Critical Terms for Literary Study. The essay makes two well-known claims. The first is that "On or about December 1, 1987, the nature of literary theory changed" (20). However witty or ironic this is meant to sound, it presents an unfortunately trivializing history of literary theory, suggesting that somehow it was only with the revelation of de Man's wartime writings that theorists realized that the world was a serious place. Harpham's other succinct and familiar claim in this chapter, that narrative "negotiates the relation . . . of the is and the ought" (36) is a far more productive insight. Harpham nicely shows how this formula subsumes the question in narrative theory of which comes first, the reader or the text, and makes this an ethical, rather than a strictly formal problem. It is entirely plausible that this model could be applied to other modes of formalist reading in order to show the centrality of ethical concerns even when they seem to be invisible.

In Chapter Three, Harpham takes the fact/value dilemma from Hume (beginning with a brief reading of Hume's text that shows that Hume himself is more ambivalent, and unsuccessful, in making this distinction than a unified critical heritage that makes him into the guarantor of the difference thinks he is) into an observation about a governing structural paradigm of criticism: that critics inevitably construct the truth of their own analyses by presenting their own work as fact, the "is" (a site of "necessity, obligation facticity") observing value, an "ought" (a site of "freedom, choice and desire" [48]). Harpham's examples in this essay are Terry Eagleton's critique of Lyotard and Susan Stewart's reading of the Meese Report on pornography, but he obviously realizes that the same charge can be leveled against his own meta-analysis: that by uncovering the evaluative choices made by Eagleton and Stewart, he positions himself as the "is" to their "oughts." His conclusion to the essay neatly frames the issue: "not only is this the way it is," Harpham allows, but "the way it ought to be" (49). If Hume could not separate fact and value, neither will Harpham.

Harpham plays this distinction to much higher stakes in what is perhaps the most substantive essay in the volume, "So . . . What Is Enlightenment? An Inquisition into Modernity." This essay takes Foucault's late essay "What Is Enlightenment?" as its springboard and challenges the confident "voice of modernity" that makes a clear distinction between Enlightenment and the darkest technology of premodern truth, the Inquisition. Layering Foucault's close readings of Kant with a survey of the practices and apologists for the Inquisition, Harpham comes to a Foucauldian comparison of the coherence of the "political rationale for the...