The Ethics of Writing: Authorship and Responsibility in Plato, Nietzsche, Levinas
Seán Burke
Language: English
Pages: 257
ISBN: 2:00042558
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The ethical question is the question of our times. Within critical theory, it has focused on the act of reading. This study reverses the terms of inquiry to analyse the ethical composition of the act of writing. What responsibility does an author bear for his legacy? Do 'catastrophic' misreadings of authors (e.g. Plato, Marx, Nietzsche) testify to authorial recklessness? These and other questions are the starting-point for the development of a theory of authorial ethics.
Beginning with a discussion of Plato's argument in Phaedrus that writing is dangerous because it can neither select its audience nor call upon its author to the rescue, Burke goes on to analyse the dangerous game which Nietzsche played with posterity, and the ambiguous status of writing within the ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas. At issue is how authors may protect against 'deviant readings' and assess 'the risk of writing'. Burke recommends an ethic of 'discursive containment'.
Continuing the mission of the 'returned author' begun in his pioneering book The Death and Return of the Author, Burke recommends the 'law of genre' as a contract drawn up between author and reader to establish ethical responsibility. Criticism, under this contract, becomes an ethical realm and realm of the ethical.
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the Republic, the disconnection of a truth-claim, discourse or statement from the speaker is recommended as a safeguard against the argumentum ad verecundiam: no heed should be taken of the speaker’s status regardless of whether he is a reputed man of wisdom, a sophist, a tyrant or ‘some other rich man who ha[s] great power in his own conceit’ (Republic, 336a).25 The Symposium likewise affirms that whilst one may counter Socrates, the truth is beyond contest: ‘It’s the truth you find unanswerable,
fellows’ (Phaedrus, 275a–b). In a culture of writing, texts will fall into the hands of the ill-befitted without the benefit of a teacher’s wisdom or the tutelary presence of their authors. The concern is clearly ethical in that the spread of false wisdom will have a malign effect on the social order. Where the speech situation allows the dialectician to monitor the reception of his discourse, writing drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but
ethical act of the protagonist inside the book correspond to the ethical acts the reading of the book generates outside the book?’, Hillis Miller asks, in relation to ‘the double genitive in ethics of reading’ (ER, 2).Whilst we will be concerned with the issue of protagonism and representation – especially in the ancient context of the ‘Socratic problem’ and Nietzsche’s perhaps ironic, certainly canny gauntlet of the ‘Zarathustran problem’ – we will not wish to lay any particular emphasis on the
dialectic in action. On this basis we might want to argue that the Phaedrus itself, or part of it, will be exempted from Socrates’ criticisms and if the Phaedrus, why not other dialogues too, in so far as they illustrate the principles of dialectic? But the failings identified in the written composition in general – that it always says the same thing, and cannot answer questions or defend itself – seems to belong no less to the written dialogue. If it may possess internal movement of a kind, it
Plato’s Phaedrus: A Defence of a Philosophic Art of Writing (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1980). M1105 - BURKE TEXT.qxd:Andy Q7 The Ethics of Legacy 12/11/07 15:30 Page 111 111 dialogic discourses, we can register the force of the Socratic objections to writing without implicating Plato in the performative contradiction of writing a text which outlaws writing. Just as the work distinguishes good from bad speech, so too the text can be read as counterpoising a good and a bad