The somatic and precarity: moral theory as critique

这个项目包括在最近的“转向伦理学”后基础哲学，主要是在朱迪思巴特勒的工作的关键干预。巴特勒的伦理学试图回应不稳定性，政治强加的不平等暴露于脆弱性，边缘化，伤害和死亡。本研究提出，在发展一种基于与他者的前本体关系的伦理学（Butler，2011）时，Butler重复了道德理论的一种古老姿态，以建立一种先于政治认同的伦理学。这种姿态认为伦理学是在不稳定的政治环境之外的。有问题的是，她的伦理学没有充分解决不稳定性，她的主要政治关注。我认为，道德话语仍然是有价值的，以应对紧迫的问题不稳定。这就要求对伦理学和道德之间的关系进行不同于巴特勒的理论化。在借鉴阿多诺的伦理学和道德之间的区别，我认为，道德话语挑战的特殊性的伦理要求，在一个普遍性的名义，是永远不会最终实现。事实上，在她的阿多诺奖演讲中，巴特勒建议阿多诺对道德理论的批判可能会被塑造成解决不稳定的政治（巴特勒2012）。然而，她并没有追求这一点。对阿多诺来说，道德反应性来自于与痛苦团结一致的躯体冲动（阿多诺，2006a）。躯体体验破坏了任何对预先存在的道德规范的引用，这些道德规范是我们反应的基础。这个项目重新巴特勒的理论不稳定诉诸阿多诺的道德帐户。它认为，从身体开始使一个道德理论，既不从本体论，也不从伦理学开始成为可能。相反，它始于对从肉体的痛苦体验中产生的道德冲动的政治反应。

This project comprises a critical intervention in the recent 'turn to ethics' in post-foundational philosophy, principally in the work of Judith Butler. Butler's ethics has sought to respond to precarity, the political imposition of unequal exposure to vulnerability, marginalisation, injury and death. This research proposes that in developing an ethics based upon a pre-ontological relationality with the other (Butler, 2011), Butler repeats an ancient gesture of moral theory to found an ethics that precedes political contestation. This gesture thinks ethics outside the political circumstances of precarity. Problematically her ethics inadequately addresses precarity, her primary political concern. I argue that moral discourse remains valuable for responding to the pressing problem of precarity. This requires a different theorisation of the relationship between ethics and morality to that of Butler. In drawing upon Adorno's distinction between ethics and morality I argue that moral discourses challenge the particularity of ethical claims, in the name of a universality that is never finally realised. Indeed, in her Adorno prize lecture Butler suggests that Adorno's critique of moral theory may be shaped to address the politics of precarity (Butler 2012). However she does not pursue this. For Adorno moral responsiveness arises from somatic impulses of solidarity with and against suffering (Adorno, 2006a). Somatic experience undermines any reference to a pre-existing ethics that grounds our responsiveness. This project reworks Butler's theorisation of precarity with recourse to Adorno's account of morality. It argues that starting with the somatic makes possible a moral theory that begins neither with ontology nor with ethics. Rather, it begins with political responsiveness to the moral impulse that emerges from the somatic experience of suffering.