Joanna Zylinska (2005) The Ethics of Cultural Studies (Continuum: London and New York)

The events of 9/11, the crisis over immigration, the cloning of 'Dolly the sheep', the proliferation of GM foods have all placed ethical questions firmly on the cultural agenda. Yet traditionally Cultural Studies has been more concerned with politics, leaving ethics to philosophy and literature. The Ethics of Cultural Studies argues that ethics is foundational to the Cultural Studies project and that, to continue with its political commitment, Cultural Studies must address its relationship to ethics. The book explores the interlocking of ethics, politics and culture focusing on a number of key issues: national, racial and sexual identity; violence and the media; justice and retribution; the science-culture 'wars' and the relationship between body and technology. The Ethics of Cultural Studies engages with the writings of the key theorists of ethics and culture: Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Stuart Hall, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Ernesto Laclau, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard and Samuel Weber.

Contents

Preface (available online)

1 A User's Guide to Culture, Ethics and Politics

Welcome to the culture club: c-users and abusers

Description v normativity: or, 'how things are' as opposed to 'how they should be'

Performativity: the political acts

Deconstruction: work (always) in progress

Identity: violent foundations

'Turn to Levinas': respect!

Levinas's ethics: my place in the sun isn't really mine

Ethics and responsibility: the wretched stranger is my master

Power struggle: against totality

Decision: between politics and ethics

Articulation: there is nothing outside discourse

Antagonism in the plural: the end of class politics?

Ethics before politics: looking outside

2 Ethics and Cultural Studies

Idle students and tabloid princesses

Cultural studies and ethics

The cultural studies of difference

What is cultural studies?: a responsible response

Cultural studies as a promise

3 Ethics and 'Moral Panics'

Guns, youths and hip-hop: a few familiar stories

Cultural studies and 'moral panics'

Beware the folk devils!

Cultural studies' ethical blind spot

Policing the (racial) crisis

Cultural studies before the law

Hegemony and ethical strategy

Permanent vigilance

A postscript

4 Ethics, Violence and the Media

Introduction: An immediate response to mediated murder

The sublime: between ethical calculation and infinite spending

The secular sacred: mass murder, mediation and Rausch

Whose trauma is it anyway?: ethics and sacrifice

Good and bad violence

(An)other ethics of the sublime

Responsibility and the gift of death

5 Ethics and the Body

The people you never see

The universal acts and the biopolitics of immigration

Performativity of the public sphere

On the state's threshold

The politics of blindness

An ethics of bodies that matter

6 Ethics and National Identity

The nation at war (with itself)

'They're all anti-Semitic there'

Unveiling the truth

Is there such a thing as collective responsibility?

National memory and national forgetting

Narcissism, alterity and national idenity: ethics 'under duress'

Minimal perspective

7 Ethics and Technology

Prosthetics and Ethics

Welcoming the alien: Emmanuel Levinas's ethics

'I is an other': Orlan's prosthetic selfhood

'The information is the prosthesis': Stelarc's bodily extensions

'A species for which we do not yet have a name'

8 Bio-Ethics and Cyberfeminism

(Yet more) questions of cultural identity

Softening the cyborg

Bioethics between corporal and corporate obligations

Do soft cyborgs have bodies?

Mice experiments

A modest proposal for a feminist cyberbioethics

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