COMM 2273 Lecture Notes - Lecture 47: Jacques Lacan, Alterity, Naturalistic Fallacy

• School: University of Arkansas-Monticello
• Department: Communication
• Course: COMM 2273
• Professor: Key

Document Summary

First, levinasian ethics requires respect for the infinity of other people in the world. However, hospitality can"t be indifferent towards the other, it must be partial towards the one who is the object of responsibility. We should be wary of translating the levinasian account of responsibility or derrida"s account of the laws of hospitality immediately into an ethics of irrecusable obligation to generalized others. If ethical responsibility is understood as an imperative to extend care to everyone or everything irrespective of identity, then it is made into a choice open to a subject to accept or reject. This presumes that responsibility is a kind of epistemic practice, precisely the idea that levinas argues against. What is more, understood in this way, this model of responsibility is far too stringent in the degree of altruism its demands of ethical subjects. But more fundamentally, this understanding implies two forms of indifference at the heart of the account of ethical conduct.