Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The Subject of the Ethical Turn
- 2 Empiricism, the Ethical Subject and the Ethics of Hospitality
- 3 Sexing the Ethical Subject
- 4 Vulnerability to Violence and Ethical Sensibility
- 5 The Ethical Subject of New Media Communications
- 6 Secrecy and the Secret of Ethical Subjectivity
- 7 Censored Subjects
- 8 Suffering
- 9 Hospitality, Friendship and Justice
- 10 Death, or the End of the Subject
- Bibliography
- Index
10 - Death, or the End of the Subject
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The Subject of the Ethical Turn
- 2 Empiricism, the Ethical Subject and the Ethics of Hospitality
- 3 Sexing the Ethical Subject
- 4 Vulnerability to Violence and Ethical Sensibility
- 5 The Ethical Subject of New Media Communications
- 6 Secrecy and the Secret of Ethical Subjectivity
- 7 Censored Subjects
- 8 Suffering
- 9 Hospitality, Friendship and Justice
- 10 Death, or the End of the Subject
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
… At Half-Mast
If a person very close to us is dying, there is something in the months to come that we dimly apprehend – much as we should have liked to share it with him – could only happen through his absence. We greet him at the last in a language that he no longer understands.
EXPLAINING ONESELF WITH DEATH
Death, ‘the final chapter’. It seems appropriate to leave death till the end of my small subset of all of the possible ethical subjects this book might have addressed. But, it might just as well have been introduced at the beginning, or indeed be placed at any other point, as death hangs over every ethical subject/Subject as a figure of the inevitable end, of mortality, in other words; as the horizon from which a perspective on the ethical life of the Subject might be gained.
Of course, the contemporary philosophical themes of the ‘end of Man’, the postmodern critique of anthropocentrism, the ‘post-human’ and the question ‘who or what comes after the Subject?’, which set the scene for this book's discussion of ethical subjects, are not simply concerned with the fact of mortality as a natural phenomenon. They are concerned rather with how the identification of ‘the human’ as the source and measure of both truth and value limits the scope of critical thinking to the sphere of what has been referred to throughout this book as ‘the Same’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ethical Subjects in Contemporary Culture , pp. 189 - 212Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013