Towards An Ethic and Theory of Literature without Alterity

Abstract

Globalization of contemporary literature raises the prospect of ethics inthe name of alterity. Through cultural pluralism comes the responsibilityon writers and readers alike to recognize and respect difference, or otherness. This article highlights the difficulties of constructing an ethicfounded on such assumptions, which over the years has drawn theoreticalinspiration from the work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan,often in an attempt to attest to the trauma and suffering of the post-colonialage. The philosopher Simon Critchley is arguably a promoter of sucha reading of Lacan, and of a “structural homology” between Lacan andEmmanuel Levinas, on ethical questions. But such an ethic is inconsistent,arguably ending up as an apology for the political states of affairsthat generate trauma and suffering in the first place. This article attemptsto correct certain key misunderstandings of Lacan’s work, with referenceto Lacan’s Imaginary, Symbolic and Real orders of the psyche, whichalso correspond to consecutive phases of his overall teaching of psychoanalysis. Reference is also made to the work of Alain Badiou and MichelFoucault respectively as welcome antidotes to the messianic pretensionsof Levinasian ethics, and in order to point the way towards a-signifyingtheories of literature. There is ultimately a passage in Lacan’s workthrough the Symbolic and Real orders of the psyche, from the concept of“signifier” to the “letter,” and in conclusion the article speculates, albeittentatively, that here one might find the theoretical resources for a“rubbish theory of literature,” one that would seek to divorce literaturefrom the art of pathos and the ethics of the self and its other.