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Part 1 Derrida and the Ethical and Political It is nevertheless a matter of the conditions of an ethics or a politics, and of a certain responsibility of thought, if you will… Jacques Derrida, ‘The Almost Nothing of the Unpresentable’ Anna R. Burzyska - 9783631674345 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/27/2021 12:30:35AM via free access Anna R. Burzyska - 9783631674345 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/27/2021 12:30:35AM via free access The Ethical Turn Freed from its forced anchorage, postmodern man’s faith is adrift in search of new harbours. Zygmunt Bauman, Two Essays About Postmodern Morality In 1987 David Carroll noted: There have been a number of signs in recent years that we are perhaps approaching the end of what has been labeled […] the ‘poststructuralist’ phase of theory and criticism. The gradual demise (or dispersion) of the so-called ‘Yale School of Criticism’ and its no- tion of ‘deconstruction as literary criticism’ undoubtedly constitutes the most obvious of these signs.49 In the early 1980s, a very similar tendency toward decline could also be observed in postmodern philosophy, whose critical form by then had been largely ex- hausted. To many of those witnessing the changes taking place in the humanities at that time this situation no doubt brought a feeling of profound relief. For nearly two decades, the main occupation of philosophers had been philosophy itself (as a discipline), and that of literary theorists – the theory of literature; thus, after years of scholars proving that metaphysical philosophy and its great systems were no longer capable of conveying the complexity and multiplicity of the modern world and, respectively, that theory in its so-called modern guise was no longer of any practical use, and could even be damaging to literature as a discipline, a refreshing sense of change was now in the air. After a long period of giving in to what was sometimes maliciously termed a fatal addiction to ‘self-theorization’ 50 and engaging in ‘discourse about discourse about discourse’, and a melancholic immersion in ‘things past’,51 the humanities could finally embark on building positive projects. After years of ‘twisting’, ‘dismantling’, and ‘disassembling’ (for which ‘deconstruction’ had become an all-encompassing catch-phrase), after a long and exhausting ‘session on the analyst’s couch’ (as Lyotard aptly described 49 D. Carroll, Paraesthetics. Foucault. Lyotard. Derrida, New York‒London 1987, p. xi. Hereinafter PA, followed by the page number. 50 Term coined by Herbert Blau, cited after [PS 145]. M. Krieger expresses similar views; see Words about Words about Words. Baltimore 1988. 51 Derrida’s term. Anna R. Burzyska - 9783631674345 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/27/2021 12:30:35AM via free access 28 The Ethical Turn it),52 and thus, after patiently working through its complexes and weaknesses, it was clearly now possible to begin drawing constructive conclusions from this process and searching for a new modus vivendi. Lyotard’s analogy seems quite apt, though at the time it was not intended as a call to break with the legacy of early postmodernity and poststructuralism. The main goal of the critical projects born from them had been to make both modern philosophy and modern theory aware of the ‘conceptual madness’53 they had long been slipping into, and point out to theoreticians of literature the resentments they nurtured toward students of the natural sciences, who they clearly envied for the scientific precision and verifiability of their research findings. The critical phases of the ‘posts’ -con tributed significantly to subsequent changes in the climate in the humanities, primarily because they exposed as nonsense the fundamentalist aspirations of philosophy and the scientific pretensions of theory (‘therrory’54 as it was con- temptuously labelled), the latter of which in particular displayed a tendency to wrap itself up tightly in a cocoon of systematicity, objectivity, totality, univer- sality, linguistic neutrality, and similar essentialist fallacies that should have been consigned to history long ago. An essential question now arose: what should the study of literature and philosophy look like? Numerous answers to this question were proposed, opening up new currents of thought in various branches of the humanities. In terms of literary studies, the most important of these were subse- 55 quently labelled ‘a shift from literary theory to cultural theory’, and in the case of philosophy – from discourses of Identity to discourses of Otherness.56 The term first used to describe the intellectual changes taking place in the humanities was the ‘ethical turn’, which was soon subsumed within the ‘political turn’, and later formed a current within the ‘cultural turn’. All of these ‘turns’ 52 See J-F. Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?’ The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Minneapolis 1984, pp. 71–82. 53 J-F. Lyotard, J-L. Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. W. Godzich, Minneapolis 1985. 54 Term coined by J. Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford 1997. Hereinafter LT, followed by the page number. 55 See Kulturowa teoria literatury. Główne pojęcia i problemy, ed. M. P. Markowski and R. Nycz, Kraków 2006. In my chapter in this book (‘Zwrot kulturowy’), I describe the characteristic features of this concept and explain its consequences. See also the book Kulturową teorię literatury 2. 56 This transition is approached synthetically in V. Descombes,Modern French Philosophy, Cambridge 1996. Descombes sees the first signs of this transition much earlier, before the arrival of the postmodern phase. Anna R. Burzyska - 9783631674345 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/27/2021 12:30:35AM via free access The Ethical Turn 29 shared a common postulate: the demand for philosophy and literary studies to become ‘engaged’ in real-world social problems – a call that would ultimately lead departments across the humanities to ‘open their doors’ to the outside world. In this way, the ethical turn would become the first clearly identifiable step on the road to an emerging activism that was supposed to not merely super- sede critical theory, but above all, change entirely our views on the tasks of the writer, philosopher, theoretician, and literary critic. This radical change in the orientation of scholarly research, which could be termed a transition from crit- icism57 to activism, would change the face of disciplines in the humanities for years to come. Many scholars shared Carroll’s diagnosis that deconstruction’s critical and polemical energy was waning in the early 1980s, and that this signalled the impending end of an ‘era’ in America. And while deconstruction still occupied a place on the map of literary studies, it had undoubtedly, as J. Douglas Kneale wrote, ‘lost its original radical impact’.58 Ralph Cohen, in turn, claimed that the ‘aims’ of deconstruction had already been achieved, and it could thus now be quietly abandoned.59 In particular, those who wanted to see deconstruction dead 57 I do not use the term ‘criticism’ here as a synonym for literary study, but in the philosophical sense of ‘critique’ (rooted in Kantian thought) as an approach to exploring and reassessing the foundations of philosophy. Variants of this approach can be found in poststructuralist literary theory, in which the ontological and epistemological status of the discipline are questioned. Therefore, in relation to postmodern philosophy and poststructuralist literary theory, the term ‘critical theory’ is often used (for more on this, see the introduction to my book Anty-Teorii literatury and the chapters ‘Między nauką i literaturą’ and ‘Po czym rozpoznać poststrukturalizm?’), although this is some- what misleading due to the association with the ‘critical theory’ of the Frankfurt School (although some scholars see affinities between the two, there are clear distinctions between them). The critical thought underlying postmodernism is much closer to Marx and Nietzsche than to Kant, as these two thinkers expressed an ambivalent atti- tude towards Kantian critique: while they appreciated the value of his critical project, they questioned his idea of the ‘tribunal’ as an external organ for determining the rules of inquiry, bestowing them with validity and performing an arbitral function. They therefore rejected everything in Kantian thought related to the arbitrariness of criticism in favour of its emancipatory and revisionist functions in relation to intellectual and institutional dogmatism. Such an understanding of criticism was well-fitted to the early stages of postmodernism and poststructuralism. 58 J. D. Kneale, ‘Deconstruction’, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. M. Groden and M. Kreiswirth. Baltimore‒London 1994, p. 191. 59 R. Cohen, ‘Introduction’, The Future of Literary Theory, ed. R. Cohen. New York‒London 1989, p. 12. Anna R. Burzyska - 9783631674345 Downloaded from PubFactory at 09/27/2021 12:30:35AM via free access 30 The Ethical Turn and buried as quickly as possible began pointing out – mostly to its American adepts – that it had clearly lapsed into routine. It had lost both its ability to pro- voke and its character as an ‘event’, as Jacques Derrida referred to its practices60 and those of many other subversive projects – its methods had simply become ossified. And as its founder used to say, ‘Deconstruction is inventive or it is nothing at all.’61 However, now that the intellectual climate in America had changed markedly, his words sounded more like an ominous warning. The subversive and even ostensibly revolutionary nature of early deconstruction had re- flected, in fact, the intellectual atmosphere of France in the late 1960s,62 when the philosophical and theoretical views of French thinkers took on a decidedly political colour. In America, Derrida’s deconstruction enjoyed a warm recep- tion – arriving, as it did, in the late 1960s amidst not only an intense ‘theolog- ical’ crisis63 in the humanities.

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