The ethics of form and the form of ethics: Experiments in literature and philosophy.

摘要

My dissertation examines the relation between ethics and literary form, particularly as it redounds on broader issues in history, politics, and poetics. In the course of this examination, I rely primarily on the paradigm of ethics articulated by Emmanuel Levinas, though I modify this paradigm by relating it to the ethical thought of two near-contemporaries: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin. In Part I: The Ethics of Form, I demonstrate the coherence of this ethical paradigm through analysis not only of its overt philosophical content, but of its form(s) as well. Apart from their complementarity (Levinas providing the phenomenology of the ethical encounter; Wittgenstein articulating its aesthetic component; and Benjamin extending its logic beyond the mere-human), these three shared an insight crucial to our understanding of modernism: that the form of ethics would have to express that which the content expressly could not because of the various ways alterity is undermined by representation. This insight becomes a key to reevaluating the centrality of formal experimentation to the modernist project.; In Part II: The Form of Ethics, I turn my attention to three late-/modernist writers---Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and Franz Kafka---to examine their contributions to ethico-formalism (as I call it). Central to the chapter on Beckett is an examination of his method of self-translation as it paradoxically enacts silence and what he calls the "syntax of weakness." The possibility of an ethical misanthropy is a major theme in the Bernhard chapter, as is the "pneumatic form" of his novels (i.e. narratives essentially told in a "single breath"). With Kafka, at issue is the fragmentary, aphoristic, and parabolic quality of his texts, together with his deployment of figures emblematic of a creaturely ethics: Josephine (animal), Odradek (inhuman), and Gracchus (post-human). The organizing principle of the dissertation is "general apophatics" (a term modified from John Caputo's poststructuralist theology), designating an array of negative tropes and aesthetico-formal gestures that circumvent the (non)relation between representation and alterity; this principle not only helps trace the surprising theoretical connections between these ostensibly distant writers, but exposes the latent ethical content of literary form itself.