Facing Ethics

Narrative and Recognition from George Eliot to Judith Butler

Bibliographic Data

ID12154201
AuthorsHina Nazar (0000-0002-5269-0926, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume33
Issue5
Pages437-450
Publication date2011-11-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNineteenth Century Contexts (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0890-5495 • E-ISSN: 1477-2663
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/08905495.2011.623843
OpenAlexW2034730134
LanguageEN
References cited22

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Influential poststructuralist perspectives on the novel include Kucich (Repression in Victorian Fiction), Miller (The Novel and the Police), and Armstrong (How Novels Think). See, for example, Hillis Miller (The Ethics of Reading), Garber et al. (The Turn to Ethics), Phelan (Living to Tell About It), Attridge (J.M. Coetzee), Parker (Ethics, Theory), and Larsen (Ethics and Narrative). For the most part the turn to ethics is productively distinguished from ethical criticism in the manner of Booth (The Company We Keep) and Nussbaum (Love's Knowledge). While the latter trend turns to literature for prescription, the ethical turn engages ethics as a motif within literature—that is, as one motif among others. For a succinct account of the turn to ethics, see especially Buell ("Introduction"). For Levinas' importance within contemporary critical discourse, see Buell, ibid. Levinas, Buell argues, is "the most influential recent theorist of self-other relations" (13), one who may indeed become "the most central theorist for the postpoststructuralist dispensation of turn-of-the-century literary-ethical inquiry" (9). The argument that recognition reduces the Other to the Same is developed most fully in Totality and Infinity (1969). Condensing that argument in Ethics and Infinity, Levinas suggests that knowledge is "in reality an immanence, and... there is no rupture of being in knowledge." Alternatively, "being in direct relation with the Other is not to thematize the Other and consider him in the same manner one considers a known object, nor to communicate a knowledge to him... [The] social is beyond ontology" (Ethics and Infinity 57–58). Clarifying the concept of the face in Ethics and Infinity, Levinas argues that "The face is meaning all by itself. You are you. In this sense one can say that the face is not 'seen'. It is what cannot become a content, which your thought would embrace; it is uncontainable, it leads beyond. It is in this that the signification of the face makes it escape from being, as a correlate of a knowing. Vision, to the contrary, is a search for adequation; it is what par excellence absorbs being" (86–87). I use the rubric "ethics of recognition" broadly here, to denote no one school in particular but rather to summon the liberal assumption that ethics entails "recognizing"—that is, granting—the humanity of all others. In the master-slave dialectic, as set up by Hegel in the Phenomenology, two consciousnesses meet and fight for mastery. The winning consciousness comes to see, however, that it needs the recognition of the enslaved consciousness to confirm its status as "master." As Linda Alcoff describes the master–slave dialectic, "Consciousness itself becomes an emergent entity of a social and historical process rather than a kind of presocial thinking substance that could conceivably exist entirely on its own" (329). For a wide-ranging account of contemporary responses to "Lordship and Bondage," see Williams, chapter 1. Hegel is, of course, not a new interest for Butler. In her first book and revised doctoral dissertation, Butler made a compelling case for French poststructuralism's indebtedness to Hegel's Phenomenology. See Butler, Subjects of Desire. Based on the Spinoza Lectures (given at the University of Amsterdam in 2002), Giving an Account of Oneself develops more theoretically many of the concerns of Precarious Life. The latter is a topical and informal work, which approaches questions of ethics and politics via reflections on 9/11. Both works are preceded by an article in which Butler provides a valuable synopsis of her ethical theory. See "Giving An Account of Oneself." The language of disorientation is also mobilized by Butler in the following passage in Giving an Account of Oneself: "The capacity of a subject to recognize and become recognized is occasioned by a normative discourse whose temporality is not the same as a first-person perspective. This temporality of discourse disorients one's own. Thus, it follows that one can give and take recognition only on the condition that one becomes disoriented from oneself by something which is not oneself, that one undergoes a de-centering and 'fails' to achieve self-identity" (42). Benhabib remains one of Butler's most important interlocutors in the field of feminist and gender theory, one who also draws upon Hegel. Hence, Benhabib's discourse ethics, like the communicative conception of reason charted by the Habermasian school of critical social theory, traces its roots to the vision of situated subjectivity developed by Hegel and the Left Hegelians. Benhabib and Butler have debated publicly in one of the most provocative debates of third-wave feminism, as documented in Feminist Contentions. There they differed on the question of what social constructionism means for feminism. For Benhabib, the feminist subject is heteronomous but "strives for autonomy." For Butler, the subject's claim to autonomy is belied by her status as a social being. For an incisive reading of the debate between Butler and Benhabib, see Anderson. In elaborating this Kantian principle, Christine Korsgaard clarifies that it does not presume the epistemological language of "knowledge" at all: "When you respect the humanity of others you do not regard them as the objects of knowledge—as phenomena—at all. Instead you regard them as active beings, as the authors of their thoughts and choices, as noumena" (xi–xii). See Korsgaard. On this point, see especially Hillis Miller (The Form of Victorian Fiction; Others). For the Eliot-Feuerbach connection, see Shaffer (Kubla Khan), Ermarth ("George Eliot's Conception"), and Nazar ("Philosophy in the Bedroom"). For an insightful reading of Silas Marner along these lines see Novy, chapter 5. While I have focused in this essay on "liberal" and "poststructuralist" interpretations of Hegel, there are also conservatively communitarian examples of social constructionism, and one might say that Eliot wavers between the communitarian and liberal camps

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