Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 10 Number 2, August 2009
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Jacobs, Carol. Skirting the Ethical. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2008. 223 pp. ISBN-10: 0-8047-5790-9, ISBN-13: 978-0-8047-5790-4, pbk: $US 24.95.
Reviewed by
University of Otago
Carol Jacobs has put together six stimulating essays – three of which have appeared previously and one of which has been published in part before – under the allusive title of Skirting the Ethical. The essays present analyses of single works by poets (Sophocles, Sebald), thinkers (Plato, Hamann) and, in the case of Jane Campion, a contemporary filmmaker. The linking thread in the analysis of works separated from one another in time, genre, style and literary-artistic intention is the proposition that the works “openly stake(s) out ethico-political positions”. As each of Jacobs’s micro-analyses unfolds, the ostensibly clear positions defended by the authors are progressively unseated and, in places, resolutely undermined. Unshakable judgments are challenged, imperious edifices unmasked as “literal and letteral tyrannies”; the medium of representation itself is revealed as problematic and uncertain – certainly not fit for the communication of timeless truths. The conclusion to be drawn, as Jacobs puts it in her preface, is: “[T]here is […] no way to avoid skirting the ethical.”
As Jacobs sets out to show, the ethical is “skirted” in the sense that it cannot be taken front on or deduced directly. Each attempt undertaken to frame the ethical as a region of unshakable conviction by the authors in question is shown in some way to come up short, miss its mark, or even in the end to slink away entirely from view. The ethical is also “skirted” in the sense that it is given a skirt, which is to say, it is critiqued on the grounds of gender. In some analyses this means that the ethics as defended by some of the authors is shown to be a construct made by men predominantly for the consumption of patriarchal society. In other analyses, such as Campion’s The Piano, where the terrain traversed in the film is consciously about gender trouble from the beginning, Jacobs’s critical perspective adds yet more gender-specific complexity. In all cases it is shown to be unspeakably difficult to respond to the call of ethical judgment in the kinds of artistic and philosophical scenarios described in the book.
Jacobs makes the reader aware of the difficulty of countenancing the ethical by treating each work as an aesthetic document. This allows attempts to speak about the ethical to be critiqued from the vantage point of the performativity lying behind all textual utterances. When we read Jacobs, therefore, the ground moves in two ways: on the one hand, the ethical arguments under review do not necessarily stack up in their own, logical terms; on the other hand, these arguments are also unmasked as acts of persuasion, caught in the attempt to disambiguate what is never less than ambiguous on formal, textual grounds. Jacobs’s essays can therefore be read as finely tuned “master” classes in the practice and philosophy of deconstruction. As Jacobs demonstrates again and again in her analyses, there is always more thinking to be done, more problems to consider, new perspectives to assay. To this extent, each analysis contributes more understanding, but also less certainty, about the nature of the ethical. Yet this may ultimately be the only way to approach an area of human affairs that is notoriously difficult to systematize, as philosophy since Kant has repeatedly demonstrated.
Each chapter in this marvellously self-aware volume of essays therefore has riches to offer. One hesitates to commend one before any of the others. Nevertheless I would particularly draw attention to the excellent discussion of Plato’s Republic and the concluding chapter on Campion’s Piano. In the former, the construction of the ethical state cannot silence the difference that gnaws away at it. In the latter, Jacobs shows that the ethical discussion, which might possibly require “certainty with respect to reality” to come about if we are to know anything at all about the ethical in a predictive sense, is dogged by the failure to find such certainty. In the unforgettable final sequences of The Piano Ada, the film’s protagonist, steps with as little calculation into the coiling rope that flings her into the sea as she does when she steps back into her life with her husband – the husband who had mutilated her finger. As Jacobs points out, while we are not to imagine Ada reconciled with her husband, she is not unhappy in this new life either. Nothing in the end remains certain, except, perhaps, the swirling thoughts and feelings that we recognize as the lineaments and characteristic texture of the ethical.