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.
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