To What Extent Can Ethics Be Critical? A Practice-Oriented Approach to the Relationship Between Literary Studies, Critique and Ethics

Abstract

If we approach ethics as a demanding practical orientation, we must realize that, since criticism necessarily creates distance, it practically reflects itself out of the Levinasian proximity, whereas ethical relation, by comparison, requires to stay with or in the company of the other. Ethical encounter preserves the difference between participants, but instead of asserting or constructing a critical stance of my own, I am exposed to the impulses of the other and I learn to attune myself to them through gestural resonances. My proposal called practice-oriented physics conceives of literature not as texts, contexts or socio-historical construction, but as living gestures of attention in the time(s) of literary writing and reading. This paper explores these theoretical and practical problems in a short story by Ádám Bodor, extending the critical “extendance” of the “Saying” beyond the “Said” to the rhythmic dimensions of practical orientation.