Re: [-empyre-] a book, dna and code

["sdv@krokodile.co.uk" <sdv@krokodile.co.uk>]

Judith,

I think you are being disengenuous here, you know very well that the 
ethical turn is a central aspect of post-modernity. Ethics became 
deeply problematic because within the postmodern it clearly substituted 
(ethics) for politics.  Badiou is exceptionally good on critiquing this 
substitution of ethics and relations for politics, for example: "The 
objective foundation of contemporary ethics is culturalism, in truth a 
tourists fascination for the diversity of morals, customs and 
beliefs..." Resistance in other words is not ethics, indeed quite the 
opposite for resistance requires more universals which ethics always 
denies...

I raise this because ethics does not condemn Watson. What condemns 
Watson is not the banal stupidity of his racism. but the terrible 
science he condones(not a psuedo-science) which derives from the strange 
idea that one human may have greater value than another human.  These 
two things are not ethical issues but are scientific and ontological.

ah the sufferings of a bourgoius transcendentalist like Watson !

best
steve

Judith Roof wrote:

> But surely beyond this?  I do resist ethics because I think they are  a 
> palliative and very much beside the point, so tangled in values and  
> ideologies and good intentions. Maybe resistance is ethics.  Others  
> suggest that analysis is already ethics or that critique without  ethics 
> is meaningless.  My question (instead of resistance) is why  this leap 
> to the "ethical."  I think such a leap made in the name of  ethics often 
> forecloses all sorts of relations, anomalies,  infelicities, interesting 
> and operative details.  Ethics itself  can  and probably should be 
> examined, not as a naturally occurring pious  category, but as a kind of 
> evasion that thinks it is on point.  Maybe  it is, but its method is 
> different, it presumes pre-existing values  of some sort.  This is not 
> an either/or analysis/ethics, but a sense  that ethics without deep 
> suspicion is as empty as analysis without  paranoia.  Of course maybe 
> ethics is a species of deep suspicion, but  isn't it some kind of ethics 
> that damns Watson?   Why damn?  Why not  see him for the theme park he 
> has become?
>
> Cheers from the Rabelaisian