By Seán Burke
The moral query is the query of our instances. inside serious idea, it has concerned with the act of analyzing. This examine reverses the phrases of inquiry to examine the moral composition of the act of writing. What accountability does an writer undergo for his legacy? Do 'catastrophic' misreadings of authors (e.g. Plato, Marx, Nietzsche) testify to authorial recklessness? those and different questions are the starting-point for the advance of a idea of authorial ethics.Beginning with a dialogue of Plato's argument in Phaedrus that writing is harmful since it can neither opt for its viewers nor name upon its writer to the rescue, Burke is going directly to examine the damaging online game which Nietzsche performed with posterity, and the ambiguous prestige of writing in the moral considered Emmanuel Levinas. At factor is how authors might shield opposed to 'deviant readings' and examine 'the possibility of writing'. Burke recommends an ethic of 'discursive containment'. carrying on with the venture of the 'returned writer' started in his pioneering ebook The dying and go back of the writer, Burke recommends the 'law of style' as a freelance drawn up among writer and reader to set up moral accountability. feedback, below this agreement, turns into a moral realm and realm of the moral. (08/01/2008)
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Extra resources for The Ethics of Writing: Authorship and Legacy in Plato and Nietzsche
Sample text
Indeed, we would have to ask if such a thing as pure misinterpretation is possible. : : On no man else But on me alone is the scourge of my punishment. (Sophocles, Oedipus Rex) Famously, and with a prescience with which the succeeding century would have surprised even the founder and master architect of dialectical idealism, Hegel identified ‘the risk of reason’, the inevitable danger that the unfettered idea would run its logical but potentially calamitous course.
A never so infinitesimal sluggishness of the intestines . . suffices to transform a genius into something mediocre, something “German” ’ (EH, 24). Disturbed intestines explained the origins of the Aryan spirit. Mengele ordered soup before the meal! The meat was cut into shreds, the vegetables fatty and flour-coated. Pudding was no more than a paperweight! The boy’s face was nothing remarkable, Mengele declared. AuschwitzBirkenau, Nietzsche wryly agreed, was the face of a child. The Spirit of Gravity was now heavy upon his stomach, the spirit he had so vehemently denounced in Zarathustra.
Only by separating out the personality of the poet from the content of the poem, by enforcing a critically reflective distance between person and poem, can Plato ensure that the artificer takes as much responsibility for the artifice as a parent for its child. In this moment of interrogation, literature is demystified, finds itself accountable to philosophical ethics and the modern conception of the author as a rational agent comes into being. Dialogue decisively consolidates this ethical ambition, this immense ‘modernisation’ of knowledge.
