Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century

In the introduction to a 2002 special issue of diacritics on ethics and interdisciplinarity, mark sanders asks us to consider, “What points of contact, if any, are there between the current investment in ethics in literary theory, and the elaboration of ethics in contemporary philosophy?” (3). Yet the question behind this question—the one that motivates his selection of essays for the issue—is why literary critics and theorists have drawn their ideas about ethics from Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou but have felt little or no need to consult past or present moral philosophers. As Sanders goes on to note, while “in North America and the Anglophone world generally, the tendency in ethics has been to bring moral reflection to bear on questions in political theory,” there “has been relatively little attention among literary theorists to developments in disciplinary philosophy” (4).