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
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