The Turn to Ethics

by Garber,Marjorie

• ISBN13: 9780415922258
• ISBN10: 0415922259
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-08-11
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

What kind of turn is the turn to ethics? A Right turn? A Left turn? A wrong turn? A U-turn? Ethics is back in literary studies, philosophy, and political theory. Where critiques of universal man and the autonomous human subject had, in recent years, produced a resistance to ethics in many fields of scholarship, today these critiques have generated a crossover among disciplines and led to theories and practices that see and do ethics otherwise. The decentering of the subject, the contributors to this volume suggest, has brought about a recentering of the ethical. The philosophers, political theorists, literary critics and physician whose essays are collected here bring the particularities of their disciplines and training to a vital complex of questions. Many of these authors express concerns that the turn to ethics is a turn away from politics towards moralism. All ultimately conclude, however, that such concerns, rather than leading away from ethics, have helped to reinvigoratethe intellectual field in the present moment. Contributors: Judith Butler, Homi K. Bhabha, Lawrence Buell, Nancy Fraser, John Guillory, Beatrice Hanssen, Barbara Johnson, Perri Klass, Chantal Mouffe, Doris Sommer, Rebecca Walkowitz.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Turn to Ethics	vii
Marjorie Garber
Beatrice Hanssen
Rebecca L. Walkowitz
What We Talk About When We Talk About Ethics	1	(14)
Lawrence Buell
Ethical Ambivalence	15	(14)
Judith Butler
The Ethical Practice of Modernity: The Example of Reading	29	(18)
John Guillory
Using People: Kant with Winnicott	47	(18)
Barbara Johnson
The Best Intentions: Newborn Technologies and Bioethical Borderlines	65	(20)
Perri Klass
Which Ethics for Democracy?	85	(10)
Chantal Mouffe
Recognition without Ethics?	95	(32)
Nancy Fraser
Ethics of the Other	127	(54)
Beatrice Hanssen
On Cultural Choice	181	(20)
Homi K. Bhabha
Attitude, Its Rhetoric	201	(20)
Doris Sommer
Cosmopolitan Ethics: The Home and the World	221	(10)
Rebecca L. Walkowitz
Contributors	231	(4)
Index	235