2 - Language, ethics, and subjectivity in the liberal/communitarian debate

Summary

The strong textualist simply asks himself the same question about a text which the engineer asks about a puzzling physical object: how shall I describe this in order to get what I want?

Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism

There … is a deep incompatibility between the standpoint of any rational tradition of enquiry and the dominant modes of contemporary teaching, discussion and debate.

Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry

In chapter 1, I argued for breaking the poststructuralist genealogies of power and for exploring ethical and cultural resources in ways that Habermas's universalizing reconstructive science does not permit. If poststructuralism shows how cultural differences have been suppressed, it provides no way of articulating the ethical goods of alternative cultures or of deliberating about these conflicting goods. This chapter takes up these two problems. I use the phrase “ethical goods” which will seem bizarre to literary critics, precisely to force the problem of value out of the impoverished vocabulary of literary theory toward ethical theory. I will bring the concerns of ethical theory into the interests of literary theory by connecting ethics to the philosophy of language and hence to textual practices. In this way, I will heal the split noted by Martha Nussbaum between Anglo-American ethical theory and literary theory – see the Introduction – and show how a politics of difference does not have poststructuralism as its only resource.