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June 7, 2006
Rosa Braidotti says that:
The nomadic view of ethics takes place within a monistic ontology that sees subjects as modes of individuation within a common flow of Zoe. Consequently there is no self-other distinction in the traditional mode, but variations of intensities, assemblages set by affinities and complex synchronizations. Bio-centred egalitarianism breaks the expectation of mutual reciprocity that is central to liberal individualism. Accepting the impossibility of mutual recognition and replacing it with one of mutual specification and mutual co dependence is what is at stake in nomadic ethics of sustainability. This is against both moral philosophy of rights and the humanistic tradition of making the anthropocentric other into the privileged site and inescapable horizon of otherness.
This rejects the old idea of body as a mechanism. Does it point to an intercorporeal world of bodies that is based in concrete relations connecting bodies below the level of conscious intent? Do we not encounter others as lived bodies?
Braidotti asks:
If the point of ethics is to explore how much a body can do, in the pursuit of active modes of empowerment through experimentation, how do we know when we have gone too far? How does the negotiation of boundaries actually take place? This is where the non-individualistic vision of the subject as embodied and hence affective and inter-relational, but also fundamentally social is of major consequence. Your body will thus tell you if and when you have reached a threshold or a limit. The warning can take the form of opposing resistance; falling ill, feeling nauseous or it can take other somatic manifestations, like fear, anxiety or a sense of insecurity. Whereas the semiotic-linguistic frame of psychoanalysis reduces these to symptoms awaiting interpretation, I see them as corporeal warning signals or boundary markers that express a clear message: “too much!”
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I'd have a couple of problems with this author's account. For one, wouldn't the opposite of an "ethics" of compensation, based on the entitlement of an already constituted ego through its symetrical and equal status with all other egos, through its "mirroring" in them, be an ethics of reparation, that is, of a working-through to an instauration/restauration of relatedness? And could the latter really be described as "affirmation", as dispensing entirely with "negativity", as well as, demarcation/difference from the other? And can the issue really be described entirely in terms of "immanence"/bodiliness? What of the shock of "exteriority", which at once locates one bodily in the world, "prior" to any assumption or constitution of interiority, and marks one's separateness from the other?
Which raises the second problem: doesn't the "horizon" of the other open up the very domain of the ethical, affecting one even before any awareness of it, as a "space" of possible norms and values, which can not be reduced to bodies and relations, to physical realities and states of affairs, because it is precisely counterfactual, deontic? Doesn't the possibility of any sort of ethics refer to a non-physical dimensional space, as well, since it attaches to the dim recognition of the human as distinct from any environment, not because it is a mastery of environmental conditions, but becase it is an exposure to them? Wouldn't this apply to an "antihumanist" ethics, as well, as its disavowed condition and "inspiration"? I'm suspicious of an attempt to renew metaphysics/ontology, in however revised a form, to underwrite an ethics, which strikes me precisely as compensatory. Doesn't the ethical arise in spite of, rather than because of any conditions of being it fatally, contingently encounters? It can't simply be a matter of an invention/occupation of a body,- (and why are "affects" bodily rather than relational?),- but rather a living-through the bodily in the open "space" of relations with others. That does not require any particular constitution or arrangement of being, but rather the passivity/receptivity of an acceptance as a task of working-through. And certainly an historical memory, a refusal of its reification/forgetting in the name of "immanence", is part of that, no?
Thirdly, perhaps there is an ironical convergence of a Kantian-style ethics as normative political philosophy, (e.g. Rawls), and its anti-humanist opponents, in that both attempt to limn the political, as an entering into the public, on the basis of a "prior", private "right". It is the very "secrecy" of the ethical that at once distinguishes it from and subtends the political. But there is no direct and continuous passage from the one to the other, such that the political is merely the personal. The impersonality of the political is constitutively in tension with the ethical. Morality does not extend into political rights as absolute ends in themselves, but rather political rights serve to elevate the potential of political conflict to a more "productive" resolution, or, at least, a more accurate pursuit. Conversely, even the most marginal, "minoritarian" community,- and why exactly would one want to deliberately render oneself marginal?- must enter into public to secure its activity. Differentiation too is not an absolute end in itself, but is subject to the differences that make a difference.