Living things and the limits of ethics: Hegel, Levinas, Butler.

摘要

In her current engagement with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Judith Butler asks whether we can ground an ethics and/or a politics in corporeal vulnerability alone. Her hope is that recognition of a shared corporeal vulnerability may counteract those forces of dehumanization that exclude or expel certain persons from the category of the "human." But having introduced corporeal vulnerability as an ethically relevant category, Butler's analysis implicitly raises the issue of the ethical standing of non-human living things. I turn to Hegel's account of Life as a way of responding to Butler's provocation, and show that the conflicted ontology of living things as described by Hegel creates certain unavoidable dilemmas for any ethics of corporeal vulnerability. In response to the most intractable of these dilemmas, I argue that certain strategies developed within the domain of aesthetics can serve as essential compliments to ethics at the point at which ethics finds its functional limit in relation to this conflicted ontology. While I maintain that no proscriptive relationship is to be legitimately forged between ethics and aesthetics, I show that each is relevant in its own way and in its own right to the project of building a more compassionate, more broadly humane world.