Narrative Ethics in Butler and Cavarero
By Tim Huzar, PhD Candidate, University of Brighton
5pm University of Brighton Board Room, 68 Grand Parade, Brighton
Abstract:
In this presentation I engage the work of Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler to think through the role of narrative, and the reciprocal activity of reading, for a feminist ethics. The presentation begins by reading an event narrated by Miklós Nyiszli (1960: 88-93) and later repeated by Primo Levi (1989: 38-40), of the emergence of a young woman from the gas chambers of Auschwitz. For Levi, the workers of the gas chambers are “perplexed” (Ibid. 39) by the woman’s emergence; they “no longer have before them the anonymous mass, the flood of frightened, stunned people coming off boxcars: they have a person” (Ibid. 39). The woman appears to the workers as “the single individual, the Mitmensch, the co-man: the human being of flesh and blood standing before us, within the reach of our providentially myopic senses” (Ibid. 40).
What are the conditions that mediate the emergence of this woman in her singular specificity, as distinct from the “anonymous mass” that is the proper functioning of the death camp? By using Cavarero and Butler’s thought, this presentation makes two claims: first, that the emergence of the woman should be understood as a mark of her “singularity” (Cavarero 2011: 19) as Cavarero understands it; and second that, following Butler (2015), the woman emerges to particular people, principly the workers of the gas chambers, but also, crucially, to the reader of Nyiszli and Levi’s respective books. In this light narration and the reciprocal act of reading play an important ethical role, one which is explored by reading Cavarero and Butler alongside one another.
Bio
Tim Huzar is a PhD student at the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, University of Brighton. His research looks at violence, vulnerability and the politics of being human, in relation to the work of Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Elaine Scarry and Jacques Rancière. Tim is a member of the Critical Studies Research Group, and co-editor of the group’s journal Critical Studies.
The Arts and Humanities Research Forum (AHRF) is a research forum for staff and students in the University’s Arts and Humanities College generated by the Doctoral College and the Centre for Research and Development The AHRF is a fortnightly event series open to all research students and staff as well as open to the public as audience members. The forum provides a regular facilitative context in which researchers can trial or rehearse research designs, argue for and justify appropriate methodological approaches and frameworks, and debate theory/practice relationships in their studies.
Please contact J.Lane2@Brighton.ac.uk for further details