Ethics of Liberation or Liberation from Ethics? by Bruno Bosteels

Following Rancière's conclusion in the last chapter of his recent book Aesthetics and Its Discontents-a book whose title clearly echoes Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents-we could summarize the recent shift as the ethical turn in aesthetics and politics: "The essential aspect of this process is certainly not the virtuous return to norms of morality. It is, rather, the suppression of the division that the word 'morals' implied," and, thus, it is the suppression of politics, since for Rancière "this dividing of violence, morality and right has a name. It is called politics. Politics is not, as is often said, the opposite of morals. It is its dividing. "10

Using the contrasting examples of Bertold Brecht's theater and Lars von Trier's Dogville, as well as the similar contrast between Alfred Hitchcock's noir films and Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, Rancière describes how morality today, instead of dividing our sense of justice and injustice as it did before, has led, due to a generalized turn to ethics, to a state of indistinctness in which we are all ultimately victims of some originary trauma, witnesses to some radical evil, or subjects of an overwhelming catastrophe. The result is an unprecedented dramaturgy of evil and endless reparation, to which we may also attribute the appeal of the many melodramatic scenarios that we have come across in this book. Unlike what happens in Revueltas's Los errores or Rozitchner's Moral burguesa y revolución, ethics no longer opens up a promise of radical emancipation beyond the recognition of one's inevitable moral responsibility in the face of history's unfolding. There is no longer a division, for example, between bourgeois morality and revolutionary ethics. Instead, as can be seen in Gutiérrez Alea's movie version of Memorias del subdesarrollo, alienation and underdevelopment-also in the structural sense of the film's disjunctions between individual and group, image and sound, action and thought, documentary and fiction-come to define the human condition from which only a criminal lie can promise to liberate us. Art and literature, after the ethical turn, would then be expected to bear witness to this impossibility, the noble philosophical name for which is finitude. In fact, while they are no longer expected to engage in any (narrative or figurative) representation, art and literature are said to respond to the ethical call when they bear witness to a seemingly infinite array of situations of victimhood, from the body in pain to the Holocaust.