Narrativity and Self-Opacity As Resources for Contemporary Ethics in Alasdair Macintyre and Judith Butler"

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Narrativity and Self-Opacity As Resources for Contemporary Ethics in Alasdair Macintyre and Judith Butler

Title: "(De-)Constructing An Account of the Self: Narrativity and Self-Opacity as Resources for Contemporary Ethics in Alasdair MacIntyre and Judith Butler" Bio: Originally from Manassas, Virginia, Elizabeth Antus is currently a 4th-year doctoral student studying systematic theology at the University of Notre Dame. Majoring in religious studies and English in college, she graduated from the University of Virginia in 2006 and has been at Notre Dame doing graduate work since then. In her dissertation, she engages with ancient Christian thinker Augustine of Hippo, sixteenth-century Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila, and contemporary Anglican theologian Sarah Coakley in order to uncover a positive account of Christian self-love. Other theological interests include feminist theologies, understandings of intellectual disability, questions of suffering, the intersection of theology and literature, and accounts of embodiment. Abstract: In light of a deep-seated postmodern skepticism about the success of delimiting clearly the individual as moral agent, many twentieth- and twenty-first-century thinkers engaged in philosophical and theological questions have struggled to articulate the parameters of the individual's agency and identity in non-absolutist, non-hegemonic terms. Specifically, Christian ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre and secular Jewish philosopher Judith Butler have gravitated toward engaging with the notion of narrative identity as the key to understanding the moral self without abstraction, false universalism, and isolationist individualism. In this paradigm, a person makes moral decisions based on who she understands herself to be given the entire story of her life with and among others. For MacIntyre, discerning and constructing this narrative arc of one's life will equip one with the best framework for making moral decisions. Butler, however, ultimately turns to the category of self-opacity in order to highlight the fractures and limitations of this self- narrating activity and to suggest that this very opacity to ourselves may in fact provide an invaluable resource for moral decision-making, particularly the practice of empathy toward those deemed radically other. Within this presentation, I will articulate MacIntyre's and Butler's respective positions on the (non-)narrativity of the self, and I will critique each using the best insights of the other. Such mutually critical evaluation ultimately reveals both the limits of narrative self-intelligibility and the need for an ever-provisional version of it. .

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