Synopses & Reviews
Justice, equality, and righteousness--these are some of our greatest moral convictions. Yet in times of social conflict, morals can become rigid, making religious war, ethnic cleansing, and political purges possible. Morality, therefore, can be viewed as pathology-a rhetorical, psychological, and social tool that is used and abused as a weapon.
An expert on Eastern philosophies and social systems theory, Hans-Georg Moeller questions the perceived goodness of morality and those who claim morality is inherently positive. Critiquing the ethical fanaticism of Western moralists, such as Immanuel Kant, Lawrence Kohlberg, John Rawls, and the utilitarians, Moeller points to the absurd fundamentalisms and impracticable prescriptions arising from definitions of good. Instead he advances a theory of moral foolishness, or moral asceticism, extracted from the amoral philosophers of East Asia and such thinkers as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Niklas Luhmann. The moral fool doesn't understand why ethics are necessarily good, and he isn't convinced that the moral perspective is always positive. In this way he is like most people, and Moeller defends this foolishness against ethical pathologies that support the death penalty, just wars, and even Jerry Springer's crude moral theater. Comparing and contrasting the religious philosophies of Christianity, Daoism, and Zen Buddhism, Moeller presents a persuasive argument in favor of amorality.
Review
“This is a work of fundamental importance. As Zalloua points out, questions of the ethics of reading are central to contemporary theoretical concerns. . . . This will be a major intervention in contemporary debates on the ethics of reading and in theory.”—Paul Allen Miller, author of
Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Reception of Plato and the Construction of the Subject in Lacan, Derrida, and FoucaultReview
"[A] truly outstanding book."—Patrick M. Bray, H-France Review
Synopsis
Drawing on literary theory and canonical French literature,
Reading Unruly examines unruliness as both an aesthetic category and a mode of reading conceived as ethical response. Zahi Zalloua argues that when faced with an unruly work of art, readers confront an ethical double bind, hesitating then between the two conflicting injunctions of either thematizing (making sense) of the literary work, or attending to its aesthetic alterity or unreadability.
Creatively hesitating between incommensurable demands (to interpret but not to translate back into familiar terms), ethical readers are invited to cultivate an appreciation for the unruly, to curb the desire for hermeneutic mastery without simultaneously renouncing meaning or the interpretive endeavor as such. Examining French texts from Montaignes sixteenth-century Essays to Diderots fictional dialogue Rameaus Nephew and Baudelaires prose poems The Spleen of Paris, to the more recent works of Jean-Paul Sartres Nausea, Alain Robbe-Grillets Jealousy, and Marguerite Durass The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Reading Unruly demonstrates that in such an approach to literature and theory, reading itself becomes a desire for more, an ethical and aesthetic desire to prolong rather than to arrest the act of interpretation.
About the Author
Zahi Zalloua is an associate professor of French and interdisciplinary studies at Whitman College. He is the coeditor of
Torture: Power, Democracy, and the Human Body and the author of
Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism.