In Speculum of the Other Woman, Luce Irigaray gives a brilliant reading of Plato's cave analogy in which she suggests that the cave stands in for the womb as well as the confusing sensory experience of everyday life from which man must extricate himself and that he must ultimately deny if he is to attain the (illusory) clarity of rational contemplation of the world in terms of the forms (Reference IrigarayIrigaray 1985). Insofar as contemporary approaches to ethics insist upon an autonomous moral agent clearly distinguishable from her world as well as from others and who is able to articulate her ethical choices in clearly defined categories subject to rational reflection and debate, they could be subject to a similar criticism of overlooking the “messier” aspects of embodied life and the conundrums they present. Feminist theory has long worked toward rectifying the lack of attention paid to the body in traditional philosophy, and it is the great merit of all three of the books under review here that they build upon this work in such evocative and compelling ways. Gail Weiss, Kim Atkins, and Penelope Ingram all offer conceptions of embodied living and moral agency that would have us rethink the relationship between language and the materiality of day-to-day life in ways that would productively destabilize entrenched notions of who we (and the other) are and allow us to engage in the reparative and self-transformative work of ethical living.

Gail Weiss, in Refiguring the Ordinary, takes a phenomenological approach indebted to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and brings our attention to the multiple horizons that inform our bodies and habits. The central argument of her book is the intriguing and useful suggestion that if we are to refigure what is taken to be “ordinary” experience, we need to better understand how race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, ability, ethnicity, and age “can function as overlapping horizons of significance” (Weiss, 12). Since such horizons tend to fade into the background, making them difficult to retrieve, it becomes all the more important to interrogate “ordinary” experience in a way that allows us to understand the “dynamic forces that give meaning to individual lives and that are both the obstacle and the vehicle to achieving lasting social change” (Weiss, 5). Individual perspectives on particular situations are connected to other perspectives through the interdependency of multiple horizons that reflect networks of social relationships and systems of meaning. Since the horizons of a situation are presupposed in an individual's perceptions and responses, we tend to overlook the “broader contexts of significance within which human beings give meaning to their lives” (Weiss, 24). Describing ordinary experiences thus requires “recourse to the horizons that contextualize them.” Such recourse can shed light on the horizons we share as well as the “fluidity of the intersubjective experiences out of which they are composed” and so suggest alternative configurations of the “ordinary” (Weiss, 25).

Weiss's characterization of the “ordinary” invites investigation into habitual ways of being, sensing, thinking, and acting that are shared or not shared with various groups of others in complicated patterns that differ from person to person. Although we can choose to track one or another form that oppression can take through various horizons at a given time, any such form diverges and converges with other forms in the patterns of activity through which they unfold. Thus, we can, in our attempts to theorize more ethical ways of living, track patterns structuring our experience in their mutual implications with other patterns rather than having to subsume experience to static categories of analysis. The understanding thus obtained could foster a more articulate sense of our interdependency and prompt ways of reformulating the terms of ethical debates to include marginalized others. Such an approach, furthermore, provides insight into why rational arguments, discussion, and debate are not always the most effective means toward change. Given the tendency of horizons to fade into the background, we cannot always see how our perceptions and beliefs are implicated in wider contexts that may privilege or disadvantage us with respect to others. A better understanding of our shared (and unshared) horizons opens up new ways of making our embodied differences accessible to public debate.

Kim Atkins, in Narrative Identity and Moral Identity, takes an approach indebted to Ricoeur that conceives identity and agency as exercised by a self engaged in creating a dynamic narrative of selfhood premised upon self-constancy. Self-constancy, on Atkins's view, is supported by processes of bodily continuity that entail mutually implicated first- and third-personal perspectives (my embodied perspective in the world as well as my body as an object of perception) as well as a second-personal perspective that emerges from “the integration and coordination of one's sensory-motor processes and cognitive development with interpersonal relationships in a broader social context” (Atkins, 8). In an especially good chapter on embodiment, Atkins draws upon Merleau-Ponty and Gabriel Marcel to argue that the “nonrepresentational prereflective nature of our embodied involvement in the world undergirds the conceptual and representational knowledge we later form” (Atkins, 38). Our practical identities emerge from the particular ways of life to which we have become habituated. Historically and culturally situated modes of living with others thus form the implicit background of intentional belief and action.

Atkins's orientation with respect to contemporary debates concerning selfhood, personal identity, and moral agency has the advantage of prompting a more pragmatic answer to the question of how to be ethical than Weiss's phenomenological descriptions. Due to the complex intertwining of first-, second-, and third-personal perspectives making up the structure of selfhood, any individual life has numerous strands that “play a critical role in autonomy and self-transformation by providing alternative candidate perspectives necessary to critical self-reflection and social critique” (Atkins, 8). Atkins advocates maintaining one's integrity as a moral agent by moving beyond claims to universal validity and instead “choosing the best alternative of oneself” from among competing possibilities (Atkins, 11). To be ethical would be to choose the alternative that least diverged from one's moral norms “guided by a conviction informed by wise counsel” oriented to those who are most counting on one (Atkins, 5). “In this way, practical wisdom attempts to respect moral obligations while protecting the agent from the greatest degree of fragmentation and destruction to her capacity for moral agency” (Atkins, 5).

I was somewhat disappointed that Atkins's narrative account of selfhood does not leave as much room for the ambiguities of embodied orientations or draw as much attention to the receding nature of what Weiss would call the horizons of our experience as one is led to expect by Atkins's nuanced description of embodiment. If embodiment defies the clear-cut boundaries of traditional conceptions of the autonomous moral agent, then we may need to give more thought to how the ambiguities of embodied existence can be allowed to emerge and even confuse public debate. Atkins ultimately defends a narrative account of selfhood that is overly wedded, in my view, not only to intentional rationality, but to an intentional rationality that is assumed to mesh reasonably well with a community of like-minded rational agents who are assumed to already, in large part, share and reflect one's own perspectives and values. This tends to throw ethical dilemmas back onto the individual as opposed to seeing them as reflecting systemic problems that could be addressed in terms of a shared background that may require intervention at the social or political level rather than the individual level of moral concerns.

Dissonance in our narratives may be due not simply to competing articulations of who we are and how our lives mean to us—it may also be due to tensions in those narratives produced through a lived experience that defies the kind of cognitive reflection or articulation that arises as one contemplates one's alternative selves with an eye toward reducing fragmentation as well as conflict with “wise” others. Sometimes it is rather the ability to open up to fragmentation and disorientation, along with turning away from those who are supposed to know, that one needs if one is to realign moral agency with lived experience, despite the ruptures in the capacity for moral agency this may entail (as, for example, Frantz Fanon's descriptions in Black Skin, White Masks can attest [Reference FanonFanon 1967]). Despite Atkins's lucid and sophisticated account of the complexities of selfhood and her concern “to prevent the myriad varieties of violence that cohabit the human world,” she concludes somewhat too readily that tensions can be resolved through cognitive reflection upon meanings that are assumed to be relatively easy to access even when they are in conflict (Atkins, 12).

Penelope Ingram, in The Signifying Body, provides one kind of response to the demand that ethics provide some opening to embodied lives whose meanings may be in excess of the terms set by public debate with her argument, inspired by Martin Heidegger, Irigaray, and Fanon, that representational language precludes ethics. Heidegger argues that language premised upon clear-cut distinctions between subject and object can sustain those distinctions only by concealing the “being-in-the-world” (human existence, beyond all subject—object distinctions, immersed in a world that emerges for it in terms of interpretations whose contexts are always shifting and which could always be otherwise) of the knowing subject. Irigaray argues that Heidegger's critique is incomplete in that it does not take into account how specific others are called upon to secure the distinctions sustaining the subject's separation from his world. She and Fanon delineate the other of sexual and racial difference respectively as the other that supports the white man's transcendence. Thus, just as is the case for women of all races, “the black man lacks the possibility of transcendence. He serves as the ground for the white man and is robbed of the horizon that Being provides the subject” (Ingram, xxiv). That is, it is because the white man can position himself with respect to others who are not allowed to position themselves that he can foreground his material and psychic autonomy. Just as representational language supports a distinct and grounded subject by concealing the groundless nature of any one way of interpreting Being, so do sexually and racially different others support such a subject (whether they want to or not) by being situated as the carriers of the abjected material and psychic indeterminacy of being-human.

Ingram accepts Irigaray's criticism of Heidegger, but rejects thinking sexual and racial difference along the binary axis of either man/woman or white/black. Instead, she argues that a (Derridean) reading of Heidegger's theory of mitsein“which imagines Being as a relation, as a revealing, between subjects provides a model for a theorizing of Being as both a sexed and raced relation” (Ingram, xxxi). Thus we could get beyond the binary distinctions of representational thought, articulate an ontology “that does not depend on representation” that could provide a “first step to achieving ethical difference” (Ingram, xxvi), and reveal the proximate, sensible corporeality in which our representations are grounded. Ingram proposes the intriguing possibility that “material signification exists beyond representation” and suggests that the “development of a new language, one that escapes the grounding of representation” could make an ethics of sexual and racial difference possible (Ingram, xxx; 121–22). To bear out her claims, she presents some provocative readings of material signification with respect to Neil Jordan's film, The Crying Game, as well as novels by J. M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo.

Although I'm not entirely clear on what Ingram means by “material signification” or how it is distinguished from representation (Ingram seems to assume a bifurcation between the two that seems to me not entirely tenable), and although I'm unconvinced by her reading of Heidegger (Ingram slides too easily from “reading Irigaray and Fanon alongside Heidegger” to, for example, formulating the Heidegger of Being and Time as demonstrating “how communication with an Other in an ethical exchange is central to the unconcealment of Being” [Ingram, 112; 63]), Ingram makes an important case for modes of meaning and signification that can be taken up into language and yet exceed contemporary categories of representation, and the necessity of taking such “deviant” (at least from some perspectives) meanings into account if one is to live ethically, even when they require destabilization of representational thought.

Weiss makes a compelling case for her project of mapping multiple horizons in the early chapters of her book. I was disappointed that later chapters are somewhat uneven and do not cohere as well as I would have liked (this is in part due, no doubt, to the original source of the chapters as stand-alone articles), but perhaps it is my desire for a coherent map of what are after all dynamic and shifting horizons that is at fault. In any event, I find her approach promising for theorizing interconnections among various forms that questions about ethical living can take without conflating them, as well as bringing the materiality of embodied living more strongly to the fore. Taking Weiss's perspective as our orientation, we could say that Ingram gives us an approach to “unconcealing” one or two horizons crucial to contemporary ethical debate, while Atkins gives us a practical approach to bringing some of the conflicts produced by one's multiple horizons into a livable coherence. Together these books complement one another in provocative ways without settling into one coherent view of how to bring our embodied differences into our ethical living. And given the ambiguities these books reveal, that may be for the best.