Re-describing an Ethics of Responsibility with Édouard Glissant Open Access
Davis, Benjamin (Summer 2020)
Abstract
In this dissertation, I argue that Édouard Glissant offers a vocabulary for contemporary ethics. In Chapter One, I present ‘the standard account of responsibility’, which focuses on individual liability and ties responsibility to possibility, agency, and reciprocity. In dialogue with 20th-century Continental philosophy, in Chapter Two I read Emmanuel Levinas to bring into relief the limitations of the standard account. Levinas reverses the presuppositions of the standard account, presenting instead a responsibility based on impossibility, objectification, and assignation. Yet Levinas's account carries its own individualizing limitations, reducing the ethical relation to a self-Other experience that remains suspicious of communities and solidarities. These limitations are too severe in a context of coloniality, wherein anthropogenic climate change and increasing refugee crises require collective political responses. In other words, Levinas’s ethical turn turns too far. Hence my central claim: in a context of coloniality, the ethical turn requires the decolonial turn. I then read Glissant in order to present a chapter-by-chapter articulation of presuppositions for a new, planetary responsibility: feasibility, participation, and solidarity. Chapter Three takes the 2016 protests at Standing Rock as an example of enacting what Glissant calls ‘the right to opacity’, and thus as an example of political participation. But more sustained commitment is required for a robust sense of responsibility. Chapter Four addresses the deeper commitments of the move from participation to solidarity. It proposes ‘diffracted belonging’ as a concept that owns up to its provincial commitments (in its sense of belonging) while foregrounding the estranging motion of what Glissant calls ‘errancy’ as both movement and practice (in its sense of diffraction). Chapter Five draws on what Enrique Dussel terms factibilidad (feasibility) to present feasibility not simply as making a judgment about possibility (‘goal x appears feasible at present’) but as a way to think about making real or actual. It argues that what is cultivated in participation and solidarity is what Gloria Anzaldúa calls la facultad, a certain capability to see oneself in relation to others and to perform an aesthetic revaluation. Overall, this study presents a new dialogue among Continental, Caribbean, and decolonial ethics.
Table of Contents
Preface 3
Introduction 14
Chapter 1: The Standard Account of Responsibility 24
Chapter 2: Toward a Re-description of Responsibility 45
Chapter 3: Participation 85
Chapter 4: Solidarities 132
Chapter 5: Feasibility 190
Conclusion 227
Appendix 235
Bibliography 236
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