Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://rportal.lib.ntnu.edu.tw/handle/20.500.12235/219

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End date: 2014Subject: search.filters.subject.Ethics

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Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Translatability and Cultural Difference
    (英語學系, 2005-07-??) Liao, Chaoyang
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    Ethics of Reading and Writing
    (英語學系, 2010-09-??) Pi-jung Chang
    Based on an ethics of reading and writing, this essay aims to study Proust's novel in terms of his treatment of the notion of self and truth associated with the attempt to come to terms with the other, and the ethical contributions of his work to the articulation of responsibility in modernity's predicament. Along with his problematization of the self, Proust draws our attention to his neurotic preoccupation with the fragility of the truth and the ethical problem of insular subjectivity. While his work has thus often been accused of implicated in or leading to subjectivism, relativism, or even nihilism, this essay argues that the ethical value of Proust's text does not derive so much from particular moral messages it articulates as from the narrative and stylistic techniques it employs and its concern with reading and writing as ethically relevant. Based as it is on an excess of signification and an anxiety in representation, Proust's work provides an alterity-oriented ethics of reading and writing, which necessitates a rethinking of the essence of self, truth and responsibility in Proust's work.
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    On Violence, Justice and Deconstruction
    (英語學系, 2003-01-??) Chung-hsiung Lai
    In this paper, I will first explore the chiasmus relation between violence and metaphysics in the thought of Levinas1 and Derrida. Then, I will move to examine “the aporia2 of justice” in Derrida’s reinterpretation of Benjamin’s critique of violence with respect to law-making and law-preserving. Finally, by problematizing the aporia of deconstruction, I will attempt to provide a critique of Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy” in order to place Derrida’s ethical account of deconstruction under erasure. My core contention is: if de- construction is, as Derrida claims, ethical and just, it must be unethical and unjust in the first place in what he calls an “economy of violence.” Violence per se lies at the heart of both deconstructive justice and injustice. Yet, to achieve the former, the latter paradoxi- cally must be accomplished first—a betrayal which functions as the condition of possibility and thus of impossibility of deconstructive justice—thereby making the very moment of deconstructive decision an anxious and painful experience of aporia, or in Kierkegaard’s phrase, “a moment of madness.”
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    Of Monster and Man
    (英語學系, 2006-01-??) Ku, Chung-hao
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    Derrida and the Problem of Ethics
    (英語學系, 2003-01-??) Shyh-jen Fuh
    An increasing number of literary critics and theorists have come to investigate Derri- da’s contribution to ethics in recent years. This trend both challenges an earlier tendency to attack Derrida for being ethically irrelevant and complicates the discussion of the relationship between deconstruction and ethics. In response to the on-going debates over the ethical significance of Derrida’s works, this paper attempts to trace the relationship between Levinas and Derrida with regard to the thinking or problematizing of ethics: while Levinas foregrounds ethics as “first philosophy,” seeing the ethical relation as a fundamental openness to the other that precedes subjective being, Derrida—seeing de- constructive “reading” as an opening out of the text (of “writing”)—is aware of the danger (and perhaps impossibility) of clearly “naming” that which is “ethics” (or “ethic- al”), as well as the need to be open to its “possibilities.” My contention then is that, if Levinas’s ethics involves moving beyond the totality of being to the infinity of otherness, deconstruction is simultaneously ethical and non-ethical, exceeding incessantly the boundary of the ethical.
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    Vierges en Fleurs
    (英語學系, 2004-07-??) Chen, Chun-yen