T H E T U R N T O

A book series from the

Humanities Center
at Harvard

Marjorie Garber, Editor

Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Associate Editor

Media Spectacles
Marjorie Garber, Jann Matlock, and
Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Editors

Secret Agents
The Rosenberg Case, McCarthyism, and Fifties America
Marjorie Garber and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Editors

The Seductions of Biography

Mary Rhiel and David Suchoff, Editors

Field Work
Sites in Literary and Cultural Studies
Marjorie Garber, Paul Franklin, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz,
Editors

One Nation under God?

Religion and American Culture
Marjorie Garber and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Editors

Psychoanalysis, Historicism, and Early Modern Culture

Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, Editors
T H E T U R N T O

Edited by
Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen,
and Rebecca L. Walkowitz

ROUTLEDGE
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The turn to ethics / edited by Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and
Rebecca L. Walkowitz.
p. cm
Proceedings of a conference.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-415-92225-9 (hb) - ISBN 0-415-92226-7 (pb)
1. Ethics-congresses. I. Garber, Marjorie B. 11. Hanssen, Beatrice. 111.
Walkowitz, Rebecca L., 1970-
BJ19 .T87 2000
1 7 0 4 ~12 99-053685

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The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.
 Contents

INTRODUCTION:THETURN TO ETHICS vii

Marjorie Garbev, Beatrice Hanssen,
and Rebecca L. Walkowitz
1. What We Talk About When We Talk
About Ethics 1
Lawrence Buell

2. Ethical Ambivalence 15
Judith Butler

3. The Ethical Practice of Modernity: The

Example of Reading 29
John Guillory
Contents

4. Using People: Kant with Winnicott 47

Barbara Johnson

5. The Best Intentions: Newborn Technologies and

Bioethical Borderlines 65
Pemi Klass

6. Which Ethics for Democracy? 85

Chantal Mouffe

7. Recognition without Ethics? 95

Nancy Fraser

8. Ethics of the Other 127

Beatrice Hanssen

9. On Cultural Choice 181

Homi K. Bhabha

10. Attitude, Its Rhetoric 201

Doris Sommer

11. Cosmopolitan Ethics: The Home and

the World 221
Rebecca L. Walkowitz
 Introduction:
The Turn t o Ethics

Marjorie Garber, Beatrice H a n s s e n , and

Rebecca L. Walkowitz

What kind of a turn is the turn to ethics? A Right turn? A Left

turn? A wrong turn? A U-turn? Whose turn? Whose turn is it to
turn to ethics? And why? Why now?
In the popular imagination, in the world of technology and
scientific innovation, and in the contemporary political arena,
in every newspaper and newsmagazine, phrases like "ethical
responsibility" (and "ethical lapse") appear with startling fre-
quency. Whether it's the sex scandal in the White House, the
debate about human cloning, or the question of campaign
funding reform, we have become inured to the idea that "ethics"
 Introduction

is a kind of moral orthopedics.

Often "ethics" seems to be situational and remedial, called
into being by a local and immediate crisis. In a large library or
bookstore, one can find hundreds of volumes titled The Ethics of
X or Y the ethics of abortion, accounting, ambiguity, apartheid,
animal experimentation, and (our favorite) "asking" (subtitle:
"dilemmas in higher education fundraisingn)-and these are
only some of the a's. The b's include bankruptcy, "boxing and
manly sports," and business; the c's, capitalism, chivalry, and
citizenship; the d's, divorce, deconstruction, and democracy,
and so on all the way to the end of the alphabet, the ethics of
"work and wealth," of world religions, and of "withdrawal of life
support systems."
"Ethics" is not only a praxis, but also a principle, and the
essays in this volume ask how situated examples have reconfig-
ured general theories. Ethics, contributors suggest, is a process
of formulation and self-questioning that continually rearticu-
lates boundaries, norms, selves, and "others." From Aristotle
and Kant to Nietzsche and Hegel to Habermas and Foucault to
Derrida and Lacan and Levinas to many of the essayists col-
lected here, the concept of ethics and the ethical has been recon-
ceptualized, reformulated, and repositioned. There was a time,
not so many years ago, as Geoffrey Harpham reminds us, when
"ethics" was regarded in the realm of literary study as a "master
discourse" that presumed a universal humanism and an ideal,
autonomous, and sovereign subject.' To critics working in the
domains of feminism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, semi-
otics, and Marxism, this discourse became a target of critique:
the critique of humanism was the expos6 of ethics.
Things have changed. Ethics is back in literary studies, as it is
in philosophy and political theory, and indeed the very critiques
of universal man and the autonomous human subject that had
initially produced a resistance to ethics have now generated a

-
viii
m.m"a
 Introduction

crossover among these various disciplines that sees and does

ethics "otherwise." The decentering of the subject has brought
about a recentering of the ethical.
In their contributions to this volume, philosophers, political
theorists, literary critics, and a physician bring the particulari-
ties of their own disciplinary training and interests to a vital
complex of questions, with surprisingly fresh and challenging
results. Many express concerns that the turn to ethics is a turn
away from politics and toward moralism and "self-righteous-
ness." All ultimately conclude that such concerns, rather than
leading away from ethics, have helped to reinvigorate the intel-
lectual field in the present moment.
The first several essays begin by thinking through the tension
between the poststructuralist critique of ethics and the ethical
critique of poststructuralism. Lawrence Buell situates this ten-
tion within literary studies: while some scholars-often those
with disciplinary homes outside departments of literature-
have looked to novels, poems, and plays for moral content and
values, others, often situated within literature departments,
have turned to "the dream of philosophy as a form of writing."
The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Buell suggests, offers one
model for literary-ethical inquiry by bringing poststructuralist
thought into dialogue with traditional questions of justice and
relationship. Buell invites a consideration of whether or not the
critic's "ethical life-world of obligations" is, or ought to be, part
of the question of literary ethics. Indeed, it is with the critic's
obligations that Judith Butler introduces her discussion of
Levinas and Nietzsche. Butler is interested in how both Levinas
and Nietzsche have been implicated in the ethical crises of con-
temporary cultural and intellectual history. Working through
Nietzsche's suspicion of ethics and Levinas's ethical demands,
Butler imagines a role for ethics after poststructuralism.
Just as Nietzsche, a forceful critic of the ethical tradition in
 Introduction

philosophy, enables Butler to reformulate ethics for political cri-

tique, so literary critic John Guillory, concerned that ethical
inquiry has occluded political engagement, turns to Michel
Foucault. In a provocative dicussion of lay and professional
reading, Guillory describes the practice of reading as an ethical
"care of the self." Moving to psychoanalysis, Barbara Johnson
brings D. W. Winnicott to Immanuel Kant, and rehabilitates the
concept of "using people" as a surprisingly ethical practice. Like
Butler and Guillory, Johnson challenges some of the central pre-
suppositions of what constitutes "ethical behavior."
The next group of essays measure the relation between prin-
ciples of ethics and their practice in the world. Pediatrician and
author Perri Klass describes some particular crises that con-
front doctors dealing with premature infants. Because it is now
possible to resuscitate and ventilate the smallest of newborns,
Klass explains, both doctors and parents must live with the
results of technological successes and failures. In these crises,
Klass asserts, doctors face ethical dilemmas with little time for
ethical contemplation.
In the field of politics, as in the field of medicine, some con-
tributors argue, local situations often conflict with theoretical
aspirations, so that it is not always clear whether ethical posi-
tions can exist independent of specific contexts. Thus Chantal
Mouffe, a political philosopher, contends that moralism, under
the sign of ethics, all too often replaces politics. She finds that
the notion of "deliberative democracy" ignores or excludes the
intrinsic antagonism that is a political reality and must be faced.
Addressing questions of recognition and social justice,
philosopher Nancy Fraser proposes a social theory of "perspec-
tival dualism," in which the justice of any social practice must
be judged by its attention to both economic and cultural cir-
cumstances. She offers welfare, prostitution, pornography, and
no-fault divorce as examples of complex ethical issues that
 Introduction

would benefit from an integrated approach uniting redistribu-

tion and recognition. Critical theorist Beatrice Hanssen asks
what we mean when we speak of "recognizing the other"? Who
is "the other," and how does that designation create ethical
dilemmas and opportunities? To gauge these opportunities,
Hanssen examines the particular case of multiculturalism in
international context. Reading Frantz Fanon together with
Hegel, Habermas, and Charles Taylor, she posits multicultural-
ism as "multi-ethics," offering a mediating position between
Habermas and antifoundationalist poststructuralism.
The final essays ask how contemporary theories of culture are
changing theories of ethics. For Homi Bhabha, ethics must be
reconsidered within the "landscape of cultural difference." This
is not so much a contextualization of ethics within multicultural
societies, Bhabha suggests, as a restructuring of ethics within
the framework of cultural diversity. He proposes a new view of
the contested category of "choice," maintaining that it not only
exemplifies liberal selfhood but in fact alters the very way in
which selfhood, within cultures, is constructed and understood.
Doris Sommer, a specialist in Latin American literature and cul-
ture, cautions readers against any easy assumption of intimacy
with and understanding of "ethnically marked texts. Rhetorical
moves, she asserts, may make for opacities and "surprises" that
keep "presumptively unmarked readers" at a distance. An ethi-
cal practice of reading, for Sommer, would require an aware-
ness of the cultural particularism of literature. Engaging a
similar question of the particular and the universal, Rebecca L.
Walkowitz contends that theorists of ethical reading assume
that texts possess a cultural difference that is both consistent
and definitive. Literary ethics, Walkowitz observes, often pre-
supposes a theory of distinctive, coherent cultures that litera-
ture is given to exemplify. She argues, however, that practices
and contexts of reading regularly unsettle the locations of texts,
 Introduction

readers, and cultures, and that today's ethics of reading will

need to take these disruptions seriously.
The idea for this volume was first suggested by Beatrice
Hanssen, whom the other two editors (and the contributors)
would like to thank. The editors are grateful as well to Barbara
Akiba, Allan M. Brandt, Mary Halpenny, David Horn, Sol Kim,
Lesley Lundeen, Karen Paik, Mun-Hou Lo, Elaine Scany, and
Mindy Smart.

NOTE
1. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, "Ethics,"Critical T e r n for Literary Study (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 387.

-
xii
T H E T U R N T O
This page intentionally left blank
 What We Talk About When We
Talk About Ethics

Lawrence Buell

n literary studies today, the

ethical turn seems a groundswell of still uncertain magnitude
and even more uncertain focus-a prospect offering grounds for
both excitement and caution.
To take the magnitude part first, clearly something is afoot
when a half dozen conferences and journal symposia are cre-
ated around ethics and the literary in the space of a single year;
when the Lentricchia-McLaughlin compendium of Critical
Terms for Literary Study omits ethics in 1990 but includes it in
1995.' Exactly how strong a trendline exists? PMLA received
forty-six submissions for its special 1999 ethics issue-about
 L a w r e n c e Buell

the same as for the issues on evidence and on teaching, but far
fewer than for those on ethnicity or postcolonialism or African-
American studies. My MLA database search for 1981-1997
ethics-related literature scholarship yielded 1339 entries: twice
that of deconstruction and epistemology, 30 percent more than
hermeneutics, but one-third that of aesthetics, one-quarter of
poetics, one-fifteenth of narrative, and one-thirtieth of theory.
Yet one-thirtieth of theory is perhaps not such an inconsequen-
tial fraction after all.
So much for statistics. Now to ruminate on the more elusive
why and what of the matter.
Several interlocking influences must be taken into account if
one is to begin to give a satisfactory answer to the question of
"Why ethics now?"-Why ethics talk should lately have flour-
ished in literary studies. First, to a considerable extent, it always
has, although its chief traditional subgenres (the evaluation of
aesthetic merit and the reading of literary texts as moral reflec-
tion) were thrown into disarray by the coeval perturbations of
the theory revolution and canonical revisionism of the 1970s.
Second, ethics talk, of certain kinds anyhow, has been relegiti-
mated during the past dozen years by currents within high the-
ory itself: by Foucault's revaluation of the category of the self,
conceiving of care of the self as an ethical project; by the argu-
ment on behalf of deconstructive critical practice as itself an
ethic; and by the emergence of Emmanuel Levinas as a post-
poststructuralist model for literary-ethical inquiry2 Third, the
turn by philosophers toward the literary as a preferred mode
of ethical reflection, such as moral philosophy B la Martha
Nussbaum and Richard Eldridge and postepistemological
pragmatism B la Richard R ~ r t y .Fourth,~ the ethics-in-the-
professions movement, which in medicine and law and other
fields has turned to literature as exemplum and/or model.
Much more could be said about background, but this is
enough to suggest that the ethical turn is pluriform, not singu-
 W h a t We Talk A b o u t W h e n We Talk A b o u t Ethics

lar, and that it is not ascribable to any one catalytic event, be it

the so-called fall of de Man, or the threat to Marxism posed by
the Soviet unravelling, or to cultural politics by moral majori-
tariani~m.~
Hence too the rationale for the first of four dimensions of the
contemporary ethics-and-literature conversations that I want to
single out for remark here:
1. Ethics as earnest noise. The origins of the newer litera-
ture and ethics work being disparate and sometimes mutually
antagonistic, confusion is predictable, all the more so as "ethics"
(whatever we mean by it) becomes increasingly fashionable,
thereby tempting one to make a mantra of it, tempting more
and more parties to lay claim. There is something that feels
extremely heartening and reassuring about placing ethics, with
its implication of right conduct, at the center of one's intellec-
tual enterprise-as a pursuit, ethics may well appear far more
high-minded than epistemology or ideology or politics. But by
the same token, one may easily also feel-especially in those
moments when the sense of exhilaration at engaging in the
noble pursuit of ethics recoils to haunt one with the demand for
a keener, more scrupulous self-criticism about the rigor and
consistency of one's critical practice-the result may be a con-
siderable sense of queasiness over how freely that signifier
("ethics") can slide around and metamorphose into something
other or less than it seems to denote at first.
A bald recitation of the titles of some of the first twenty items
unearthed in my MLA search begins to give a flavor of the as-yet
insufficiently acknowledged cacophony:

"Robert Coover's The Public Burning and the Ethics of

Historical Understanding"
"Misogyny, Homosexuality, and the Ethics of Passivity in
First World War Poetry"
 L a w r e n c e Buell

"Moral Identity and the Good in the Thought of Iris

Murdoch
"The Ethics of Suspicion in Augustine and Foucault"
"Of Law and Forgetting: Literature, Ethics, and Legal
Judgment"
"Ethical Roles for the Writing Teacher"
The protean ductility exemplified by this short list of het-
erogenous projects is a phenomenon hardly unique to the late
twentieth century. It dates back at least to the mid-nineteenth
century, when the emerging culture of professionalism simulta-
neously began to produce both ethics specialists and "ethics OF
discourse, built upon the notion of an ethics specific to this or
that given field. The concept of a medical ethics, a legal ethics, a
business ethics all seem to take root during the nineteenth cen-
tury, as also does something sometimes called "literary ethics."
To my knowledge, the first attempt to define an ethics of the
"literary" by a major literary figure occurs in a speech of 1838 by
Ralph Waldo Emerson called "Literary Ethics," delivered to the
assembled literary societies of Dartmouth C ~ l l e g e .Unfor-
~
tunately, like many such firsts, "Literary Ethics" makes a quite
underwhelming read today. It is little more than a dumbed-down
version of the more famous "American Scholar," sprinkled with
telltale images about the wilderness state of the American hinter-
land that likely reflected Bostonian presuppositions about the
condition in which Emerson fancies he's found his hinterland
auditors. What's nonetheless strikingly anticipatory about
Emerson's speech in present context is that he doesn't so much
define "ethics" as hold it up as an umbrella term for diffuse
reflection on the intellectual resources, the subject matter, and
the personal regimen proper to the paradigmatic "scholar" or
man of letters. Appeal to "ethics" makes possible a strategic blur-
ring of standard boundaries: between life and work, persons and
 W h a t We Talk A b o u t W h e n We Talk A b o u t Ethics

texts, poesis and academic exercise-as a consequence of which

the notion of "ethics" becomes user-friendly to both mainstream
and counterhegemonic listeners: both a critique of overspecial-
ized pedantry through its emphasis on how much wider or
deeper true scholarship is than that and a way of making even
workers in the conventional academic vineyard feel not rejected
but endowed with a lofty mission-if they do their jobs right.
Emerson does have an identifiable preferred theoretical
matrix for doing ethics, namely, a version of Foucauldian care of
the self, but it gets stretched and ambiguated during the course
of his semiautonomous reflections on writing, reading, the
academy, the state of contemporary American literature and cit-
izenship. Likewise, today, in literature and ethics talk a strong
"ethics is this, ethics is that" emphasis may well open up into a
more eclectic approach than at first seems likely. J. Hillis Miller
did not shrink from invoking "the law of the ethics of reading"
in his book of that title, and to define that law as the scrupulous
practice of deconstructionist attention to fissures within the text
("rigorous unreliability," in Barbara Johnson's phra~e);~-as
contrasted with (say) how Wayne Booth identifies ethics of
reading especially with the vision of literature as moral reflec-
tion.' Yet in practice Miller certainly does not decline to enter
into this latter, more traditional mode of ethical reading, as in
the studies comprising his sequel, Versions of Pygrnali~n,~ while
Booth for his part acknowledges that certain texts, if not most,
border on the unreadable owing to internally inconsistent
rhetoric^.^ Indeed, the famous passage in de Man's Allegory of
Reading in which he characterizes ethicity as the symptom of "a
linguistic confusion" (central to Miller's formulation of the law
of reading ethics) does not flatly restrict the scope of ethics only
to that. It acknowledges using "ethics" in an especially stipu-
lated sense, and that the "confusion" at issue arises from disso-
nance between "two distinct value systems" within the text: a
statement that, like portions of the essay leading up to it, at least
 L a w r e n c e Buell

begins to reopen a vista onto ethics that comprehends ethical

values other than discourse codes.1°
All this is not to claim that all literature and ethics talk boils
down to the same thing, only that it is a scene of overlapping
epicenters whose peripheries overlap.
2. Ethics as Relationship. Clearly literature and ethics have
to do, among other possible things, with relationships between
texts and readers-but what? At one end of one continuum sits
the via negativa of rigorous undecidability, at the other Booth's
revival of the neo-Victorian via positiva of reading mediated by
the image of the book as companion and friend. Philosophers,
such as Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, who turn to what
they consider fiction's more supple and full-blooded ethical
mimesis as a corrective or counter to formal reasoning seem to
resonate more with the latter view, while the vision of reading as
an ethics of difficulty has by and large been maintained more by
literary professionals. It is worth a great deal more examination
than I am able to provide in this short paper that contemporary
literary theory overall has so far been so much more responsive
to the dream of philosophy as a form of writing than the dream
of literature as moral philosophy. The explanation that the latter
is less attractive because less critically sophisticated does not
quite seem to suffice. After all, when Clifford Geertz took anthro-
pology on its literary turn, we responded enthusiastically even
though his model of ethnography as reading was based on an
already obsolescent new critical formalism. Likewise, when
Hayden White gave us history as discourse, we cheered him on
even though his model of metahistory was based on Northrop
Frye's obsolete archetypalism." But when Rorty and Nussbaum
try to give us literature as ethical reflection, we are more reluc-
tant to be pulled back to what looks suspiciously like old-
fashioned values thematics: the "pre-modern strategy" of making
"aesthetic sensibility ultimately subservient to the goal of moral
impr~vement."'~ Perhaps the key difference between this and the
 W h a t We Talk A b o u t W h e n We Talk A b o u t Ethics

previous two cases is not so much the specter of rampant moral-

ism as such as it is longstanding reluctance on the part of many
if not most literary scholars to allow the central disciplinary ref-
erent or value to be located in anything but language.
Conceivably the situation may change when literary theory
more fully assimilates Levinas, whose long-range influence on
literary studies remains to be seen. From a distance, Levinas can
seem the perfect abettor of the ethical turn away from both
poststructuralism and Marxism: trumping Derrida with the
claim of ethics' priority to epistemology, and preempting politi-
cal criticism by identifying ethicity with acknowledgment of the
other. But it takes some fancy footwork to get past his platonis-
tic distrust for art as substitution of image for object. To the
extent that one can plausibly redeem Levinas from himself and
for literary-ethical theory via the notion of language as ethical
expression, as a kind of "saying" unfolded in Otherwise than
Being, l3 one must sooner or later grant what literary theory has
been most reluctant to: a model of artistic representation as sur-
rogate personhood, whether of authorial agent or fictive utterer
or evocative text. A Levinasian ethics of criticism would pre-
sumably need to fuse a revised version of a deconstructionist
vision of the impossibility of reading with a revised version of
Booth's book as friend: the other for whom we feel responsibil-
ity prior to any awareness of it.14 I for one would hope to see
such an ethics of reading worked out. But one could not succeed
without finding plausible ways of rescuing Levinas from himself
in other respects also: for example, from his undifferentiated
and indeed deliberately underimaged image of the other and his
adherence to the model of ethical relation as an affair between
two persons, reducing "justice" to the status of a socially neces-
sary but ethically secondary apparatus.15
3. Ethics as imperative. In addition to relationality, "ethics"
connotes authoritative, shared operating principles, either as
key objective or as central metaphor. In the first vein (principles
 L a w r e n c e Buell

as key objective), Habermasian so-called communicative ethics

is the obvious case: seeking to set conditions that would enable
and regulate rational interchange within a discourse commu-
nity. In the latter vein (principles as metaphor), Geoffrey
Harpham takes the position that ethical inquiry in literary
studies does not point toward "an ultimately coherent set
of concepts, rules, or principles," but does imply "a factor of
'imperativity' immanent in, but not confined to, the practices
of language, analysis, narrative, and creation."16 As the rhetoric
of multiple options suggests, however, to define that imperativ-
ity factor is much harder than to declare allegiance to it-and
the same is true for the Habermasians.
Harpham himself is I think at his best when applying his
vision of ethics to formal structures like narrative plot, which he
elegantly defines as "a principle of formal necessity that governs
the movement towards the union of is and ought."17That is by
no means imperativity's only possible locus, however. Just to
take one other example, Martha Nussbaum's view of the ethicity
of the worlds that novels imagine-which she characterizes as a
dialogue between rule and perception-constitutes a mapping
of narrative mimesis equivalent to Harpham's mapping of plot
teleology, though the domain of reference is entirely different.
What these otherwise divergent ethical critics share in common
seems to be the goal of establishing the salience of an "ought-
ness" in the text without hypostasizing either what "oughtness"
is or fixing the text in a single position with regard to the con-
juncture or disjuncture of "ought" and "is." Indeed, both quite
clearly attach value to fiction's refusal to stabilize that relation.
As I strive, no doubt quixotically, to understand what might be
the chief sources of this intense critical interest in imperativity,
Levinas again looms up as a symptomatic and resonant figure.
No recent philosopher drawn upon by literary theory is more
gripped by the urgency of the ought, perhaps because at first
sight his conception of it might appear to meet the seemingly
 W h a t We Talk A b o u t W h e n We Talk A b o u t Ethics

impossible criterion for a postmodern absolute: morality with-

out ground, obligation prior to all theory, all self-consciousness,
and ('justifiedby no prior commitment" but arising merely out of
an "anarchy" created by existential proximity to the other.l8 Here
again, however, it remains to be seen whether Levinas's gift will
turn out to be like the monkey's paw in the old tale, which
granted wishes in such macabre ways that you wished you hadn't
wished them. In offering the gift of ethicity, Levinas demands
nothing less than an unconditional dismantling of one's protec-
tive defenses against the claims of the other. Prima facie, this
seems more fit to be a gospel for the privileged or the oppressor
(vide Luke's parables of the Prodigal Son, Dives, and Lazarus). It
is hard to imagine the possibility of a resisting reader in Levinas's
system, or even a relation of reciprocal equality between reader
and text considered as surrogate person. Even if one accepts that
"Peace with the other is first of all my business," will one consent
to "the passivity of an undeclinable assignation"?19
4. Ethics as professional conduct. Although doubtless the
rise of literature and ethics talk is somehow connected with the
rise in disciplinary self-consciousness that has produced docu-
ments like the MLA's 1992 "Statement of Professional ethic^,"^^
in most of the theoretical and critical work the connection is
harder to spot than it is in an ethics-in-the-professions-driven
intervention like Poethics by Richard Weisberg, for whom liter-
ary representations of legal ethics are directly related to the
work of teaching lawyers how lawyers do and ought to feel, rea-
son, communicate, treat people, and so forth.21In the field of lit-
erary studies itself, although literary texts have been and will
surely continue to be taught-at least up through the college
level-with frequent reference to how they illuminate the con-
duct of life, so far as literary scholarship is concerned, the most
searching work that has taken institutional controls and peda-
gogical contexts into account in the context of value considera-
tions-that which focuses on canonicity and the evolution of
 L a w r e n c e Buell

standards of aesthetic judgment-has generally not tended to

use "ethics" as a central term of reference.22To be sure, some of
the figures self-consciously associated with the ethical turn, like
Miller and Booth, show sensitive awareness of doing what they
do with texts in a professional context. But ironically this has
been held against them as often as it has been held up as a point
of praise: Miller, for example, has been criticized-unfairly I
think-for a narrowly professorial conception of the ethics of
reading and Booth for schoolmasterishness. Most literary spe-
cialists have not rushed to accept that literature and ethics
ought to be discussed with constant reference to the life-world
of the discussant: the ethical life-world of obligations to stu-
dents and colleagues and institution and society. I am not sure
that to do so is always a necessary thing or even a good thing,
but I am sure that it would be a good thing if the question of
whether it is a good thing were more explicitly discussed.
Indeed, it may be that one of the best things that the ethical turn
in literary studies can accomplish would be to keep us from get-
ting so easily distracted from thinking about how what teacher-
scholars do as professionals does and does not relate to what we
are and what we wish to be as persons. That, incidentally, was
something that the canonical originator of literary ethics, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, was able to do quite astutely indeed, even
when not at the peak of his form. For this, if for no other reason,
"Literary Ethics" deserves rereading today.23

NOTES
1. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, "Ethics,"in Harpham, Critical Emzs for Literary Study
(Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 387-405.
2. See particularly Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and l h t h , ed. Paul
Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1994); Martin Jay, "The Morals of Genealogy:
Or Is There a Poststructuralist Ethics?"in Jay, Force Fiekis: Between Intellectual
History and Cultural Critique (London: Routledge, 1993); Robert Bernasconi
and Simon Critchley, ed., Rereading Levinas (London: Athlone, 1991);