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Ethics of the Event: The Apocalyptic Turn in Modernism

  • Ruben Borg

Date Published:

10 Jan, 2011

Abstract:

In their contributions to the forum on "The Ethics of Temporality" (Partial Answers 8.1, 2009) Elana Gomel and Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan suggest that there can be no genuine ethical position without the rejection of deterministic models of thought. Such a rejection, they claim, is predicated upon a correct understanding of time as a real force for difference and heterogeneity - a force that remains irreducible to any totalizing discourse or meta-historical perspective. Taking its cue from that discussion, "Ethics of the Event" explores the paradoxes (ethical as well as epistemological) engendered by the modernist insight that time is real. In particular, the essay analyzes the strain that such an insight places upon the modern ideal of subjective self-determination. It then draws upon the work of Samuel Beckett to flesh out a literary model that is able to find some species of ethical freedom outside the framework of a fully self-determined subjectivity.

 

Ruben Borg is Senior Lecturer in English literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His articles on Modernism have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetics Today, Modern Fiction Studies, Narrative and Journal of Modern Literature. Since 2003 he has served as associate editor of Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas. He is the author of The Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida (2007) and of Fantasies of Self-Mourning: Modernism, the Posthuman and the Finite (2019). 

 

updated February 2019

 

Publisher's Version

Volume 9, Issue 1
Last updated on 04/16/2020