Should Poetry Be Ethical or Otherwise

Bibliographic Data

ID5339892
AuthorsGerald L Bruns (University of Notre Dame, corresponding author), Gerald Bruns
Year2009
Volume38
Issue3
Pages72-91
Publication date2009-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSubStance (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0049-2426 • E-ISSN: 1527-2095
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/sub.0.0056
OpenAlexW2017359842
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited12

“Should Poetry Be Ethical or Otherwise?” Gerald Bruns (bio) Ein Zeichen Kämmt es zusammen zur Antwort auf eine grübelnde Felskunst. A sign combs it together to answer a brooding rockart —Paul Celan, “Mit mikrolithen gespickte” 1. The Ghost of Aristotle In recent years there has been a good deal of important work on the relation between poetry and ethics.1 Not surprisingly, one conclusion to be drawn from this material is that the relation between poetry and ethics is highly conflicted, not simply because of the conceptual instability of the terms in question—“Ethics does not exist,” says Alain Badiou (Ethics, 28)—but also because any effort of conjunction threatens to limit the autonomy that opens the practice of poetry to its multifarious futures. (On my desk, as I write this, is a copy of TLS containing a review, entitled “The Poetry of Ethics,” of Geoffrey Hill’s Collected Critical Writings. The reviewer, Adam Kirsch, notes that ever since his first book of poems, published in 1959, “Hill has been concerned with the ethics of poetry. What, if anything, makes it morally acceptable to write poetry in an age dominated by suffering and evil?”2 The word “barbarism” has had poetry under surveillance for at least the last half-century.) Like the effort to link up poetry and the political—the critical mandate from the 1970s whose force is still felt both in and out of the seminar room—the articulation of poetry and ethics carries with it—certainly with the best of intentions—an attempt to provide poetry with a justification that it neither wants nor needs. The ghost of Aristotle spooks the whole project. But what if poetry, at least in some of its versions, only gets interesting when it is in excess of its reasons for being? 2. Le Dire A number of writers, myself included, have proposed—for better or worse—that there are at least two conceptions of the “ethical” to choose from in our current intellectual environment (which is two too many, Badiou would say). One goes back to Kant and has to do with the application [End Page 72] of principles or rules as to what is right and good. These rules are either universal or, as in Hegel’s theory, they comprise the Sittlichkeit—the moral customs—of integrated communities. In either event, the point of ethics is to rise and remain above reproach in one’s actions, beliefs, and character (at ease with the face in the mirror). Self-possession—autonomy—is the principal ethical ideal. To this normative theory the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas offered an alternative, arguing that the claims other people have on me are in advance of whatever reasons might be used to decide or justify my conduct. I am responsible for the good of the other, come what may—that is, my responsibility is an-archic, on the hither side of moral principles and the reasonings that provide their support—which means, among other things, that my relation to others is not one of knowing, but as Levinas likes to put it, one of proximity, as of skin exposed to the touch.3 This reversal of subjectivity is crucial. Being approached or addressed by the other, not the cogito, makes me what I am—someone who exists in the accusative, not so much an I as a me to whom the other “happens” as an event of transcendence (“otherwise than being, or beyond essence,” as Levinas’s formula has it: outside the grasp of concepts and categories). Kantian ethics appears more utopian (more in tune with bourgeois comforts) than does Levinas’s theory, but a Levinasian would argue that ethical responsibility belongs to the economy of the gift rather than to systems of exchange and their returns on investment (where the good I do for others puts them in my debt). The ethical is, whatever else it is, a critique of these systems, along with their presiding icon: the disengaged, punctual ego exercising rational control over its possessions.4 The ethical subject, by contrast, is an offering, a movement of one-for-the-other. Sometimes Levinas figures this movement as a Saying (le Dire

American poetry · Art · Literature · Poetry · Relation (database) · Sociology · Spoken word · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

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