Ana Luszczynska, Florida International University

Deconstructive Ethics in Culture and Action

My interest is in examining a post-humanistic, deconstructive ethics that can be located in an interrogation of “culture” and experience thereby allowing a legitimate inquiry into the possibilities of agency for a non-identical (or deconstructive) subject.  Drawing from the work of Derrida, Nancy, and Gilroy, I contend that a deconstructive ethics and the spacing of being it necessarily implies, can be located in actual events within concrete existence.  One productive exploratory course involves an examination of cultures with a distinctive relationship to European ideological enterprises (such as the Enlightenment) and the centrality of “the Individual” or “the Human” within this Western context. I propose that elements of black cultural expression (such as call and response and a particular relationship to representational language) provide a provocative entrance into this discussion.  Crucial to this investigation is a consideration of culture as a hybrid and morphing entity (always existing in relation to “other” cultures from which it cannot be disentangled).

As Jean-Luc Nancy rightly notes, a predominate European notion of the Individual (and its corresponding concepts and structures) is a central stumbling block to any thinking of community, which in his view is being-with (or Heideggarean mitsein), the space of a non-prescriptive, extra-discursive ethics or obligation to the other.  The event of being is simultaneous to being-with.  A radical sociality is herein implied making ethics a fundamental state of being and my dependence on the other altogether radical.  However, absent from Nancy’s analysis is the experience and agency of a deconstructed subject.  I contend that although Nancy is correct in noting that we cannot make a work or project of our understandings and thoughts (we cannot “put them to

work” as it were), as they would then fall within the reductive and totalizing confines of representationality, we can nonetheless examine contexts within the phenomenological world within which ethics as a non-totalizable, extra-discursive opening to the other, becomes manifest. 

I propose that one avenue of ethical explorations that has been largely ignored within the “theoretical” community of the academy is a consideration of “culture” as a complex, hybrid, and continually shifting “entity.”  Extending David Gilroy’s notions of the need to examine elements of music and performance of black Atlantic cultures, I submit that considering cultures with a distinctive relationship to “the European” (and the problematic notion of “the European” as a self-enclosed entity must of course be examined) provides a productive starting point for an interrogation of ethics and the contexts in which such an event might flourish. Closely examining particular moments in Toni Morrison’s Beloved reveal that we can begin to imagine contexts that provide moments in which the space of being that permits ethical action can actually flourish.

The cultural significance of exploring Beloved is precisely in the distinctive relationship to language and performance that is therein manifest.  Close readings of Beloved extend the conversation began with Nancy and Derrida on ethics, community, being, and language by underscoring textual events in which (Nancian) community flourishes, responsibility is at play, and thus being/ethics finds more breathing room.  In Beloved, these situations consistently entail an element of non-representational language, lending themselves to a consideration of ethics as it has been outlined above.  Most particularly, song has a privileged place in Beloved and close readings of these communal moments reveal what a Nancian community might actually look like, or at the very least, how we might imagine it.  Although Derrida and Nancy discuss the importance of non-representational language, particularly privileging poetic language, none actually thematize the possibilities of song directly. 

It is not that the characters in Beloved evince any kind of prescription for ethical being but rather that close readings of the text reveal that some element of what we loosely call “African-American” culture, involves a non-representational linguistic sense that potentially (although not necessarily) makes a space for being to be more forcefully as ecstatic or outside of itself and toward the other.  That these events often close in upon themselves, collapse, or sometimes even morph into what the text straightforwardly calls “meanness” is another issue entirely.  This analysis is by no means a privileging of a whole culture as this is problematic for so many reasons (not least of all because definitively identifying a culture in the first place is extremely problematic) but rather a simple declaration: there are particular elements of an African-American fluidly unique cultural sensibility which sometimes function non-literally, metaphorically (what Hurston called highly adorned and ornate language) and with an emphasis on the phatic, that inevitably flies in the face of essentialization, truth seeking, and is at its core, non-representational.  Further, I argue that such a context is thereby functioning in some way, in an ethical manner.  Interestingly, even when the structures of thought of “the master” (here literally) come to infuse the thinking of the characters within the text, they are in some way subverted, turned on their head and made into a very different object.  This is not societally insignificant as these fluid and non-representational elements of Black English are so clearly and obviously denigrated rather than valued today.  I submit to Nancy that these are actual instances wherein “our institutions, understandings, etc” are not conceived in metaphysical or essentializing terms.