This text attempts to work through some of the ethical implications of the love test in William Shakespeare's King Lear, attending especially to Cordelia's response to the love test, and to the various texts to which she alludes in her response. Applying the work of Jean-Luc Marion, the text argues that Cordelia's response marks an incommensurable separation between law and justice, that it represents an attempt to act ethically according to the law while being ethically concerned with justice, and that it also constitutes a recognition that such an ethical response cannot avoid the unethical nature of the act to which it responds. Finally, it proposes that Cordelia's response does function as an ethical response, not in spite of the fact that it recognizes itself as an unethical response, but precisely because it recognizes itself as an unethical response, pointing towards the very question of ethics itself.
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