Marie McDonough, University of Chicago

The Animality of Presence: Redefining Ethics in the Context of AIDS

This paper represents a section of my dissertation chapter, “The Ethics and Poetics of AIDS Memoirs.” I argue that attentiveness becomes the foundation of an ethical engagement with the world in Mark Doty’s 1992 memoir of his lover’s death, Heaven’s Coast. Crucially, Doty’s characteristic mode of being attentive is reading: meditations on poems are scattered throughout the text.  His careful and generous treatment of these literary objects, as of the minutiae of his lover’s illness, models for his readers and draws them into an act of literary witnessing. Doty’s text gives me the means to re-examine two critical authors in contemporary moral philosophy, Stanley Cavell and Michel Foucault. I explore whether we can conceive of a Foucaultian aesthetics of the self practiced as a Cavellian attention to the world, imagined here as a kind of living, pulsing text, and whether this might constitute a viable political and ethical mode of dealing with the AIDS crisis. Indeed, how might this model of reading as individual spiritual exercise yield ethical community? An unexpected answer lies in Doty’s emphasis on the condition of human animality – the centrality of our susceptibility to wounding and death, as embodied creatures – as a central insight afforded by the AIDS crisis. In the last section of my paper, I thus consider Jacques Derrida’s late writings on the ethics of human animality in the light of Doty’s text, using them, especially, to address recent critiques of the politics of recognition, for example by Nancy Fraser and Wendy Brown, that challenge the ethical model of attentiveness I’m advancing.