Performatism and the Ethics of Perpetration

The ethics of postmodernism is characterized by such features as face-to-face engagement 

with a Other irreducible to totalizing concepts (Levinas), by the focus on weak, peripheral 

victims of institutional force (Foucault), or by the endless uncovering of aporetic relations in 

discourse (Derrida); ethical relations appear as shifting and contingent rather than as 

universally applicable principles (Rorty). In the last few years, however, postmodernism has 

been eclipsed by an epoch that I call performatism, which forces upon readers unity, closure, 

and the experience of transcendence with aesthetic or patently artificial means. The purpose 

of this paper is to explore how performatism works in ethical terms. In particular, I wish to 

examine the specific ethical strategies developing in performatism that are associated with 

centered, active subjects, with unified, closed states, and with ethical and/or aesthetic acts 

offering ways of transcending those states. As examples I provisionally have in mind films 

and novels which turn presumed victims into perpetrators or allow characters to in some way 

“play God”: Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Lars von Trier’s Dogville, Michael 

Haneke’s The White Band, Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, or Ian McEwan’s Saturday. I also 

wish to explore how these and similarly structured works relate to transcending or 

ameliorating the various traumata of the 20th and 21st centuries.      

Name: Raoul Eshelman              

     

Bio:  

Raoul Eshelman teaches Slavics and Comparative Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians- 

Universität in Munich. He received his Ph.D. in Slavic literature from Konstanz (1988) and 

wrote his Habilitation in Hamburg (1995) on Early Soviet Postmodernism (Frankfurt 1997). 

His most recent work is Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism (Aurora, 2008), which 

represents a systematic attempt to define the epoch after postmodernism.