Ethics of difference; de Beauvoir, Braidotti and Glissant

In the above reiteration of arguments for intersectionality, black womanism, secularity and piety as agency, I have criss-crossed between epistemological claims to be heard and acknowledged to political calls for democratic intervention. However, I want to take some space to unfold the ethics in the phenomenology and post-phenomenology of difference. Returning to de Beauvoir I want to draw lines between her ethics of ambiguity (1976) and the politics of location developed in a nomadic vein by Rosi Braidotti (2006). De Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity presupposes that an ethical stance involves a political commitment, and political commitment to de Beauvoir belongs to the Left and radical political causes (Arp 2001: 113). De Beauvoir’s ethics is based on collectivity and on willing the other free. It is the other who holds the key to the future and it is therefore in the interest of the self to think in collectivities and common futures. Dividing ‘man’ into five stages of progression towards an ethical engagement with the other, de Beauvoir argues that ‘to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom’ (de Beauvoir 1976: 91).

It seems plausible that when de Beauvoir says that ‘[t]he failure is not surpassed, but assumed’ it is comparable to Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic ethics of accountability, in which Braidotti insists on reversing the Kantian avoidance of pain and rather urges an ethical transformation through the pain of loss and disenchantment (Braidotti 2006:

87). Braidotti speaks of the ethical transformation of Europe from the universalistic centre to a project of becoming-minoritarian, which she sees as a painful

transformation but potentially creative. This transformation may be linked to previously mentioned ‘discomfort’ in putting things out of line, in the terminology of Ahmed. However, I want to begin with Braidotti’s notion of the nomadic subject on which the ethical strand of her thinking is developed. The nomadic subject is a boundary figure which takes sexual difference as a starting point (Braidotti 1994). The non-fixity of identity and subjectivity is furthermore elaborated in Braidotti’s work, where the nomadic subject not only merges binaries, but also constantly moves in a flux-resisting fixity: ‘S/he [the nomadic subject] is a cyborg, but equipped also with an unconscious. S/he is Irigaray’s “mucous”, or “divine”, but endowed with a multicultural perspective.’ (Braidotti 1994: 36). The multiple connections making up the nomadic subject leaves her without a fixed identity, but instead with a continuing cartography, which in turn is realised retrospectively so as to deny a present known identity. The subject is a constant process, which is something Homi Bhabha also notes when he proposes a shift from ‘identification’ to understanding the processes of subjectification (Bhabha 1994: 37).

The concept of nomadic subjects generates a nomadic subjectivity, which gives Braidotti a way of theorising the condition of advanced capitalism as a site of transversal connections. Operating within advanced capitalism we need an ethics of interrelations, which also requires transversal discursive practices (Braidotti 2006:

138). These practices are seen by Braidotti to run in several modes supported by a politics of location:

On the side of power as potestas or negative force, the subject has to get synchronized with the public representations that are made of its multiple axes of location: gender or sexuality, ethnicity, physicality. The construction of these representations is always outward-looking or external and hence collective, interactive and driven by memory or genealogy. A crucial navigational tool to sustain this process of synchronization is consciousness-raising, […]. Consciousness is the search engine that makes certain categories emerge some of the time and hence selects them at what appears as a random pattern, which is a web of intersecting lines, made by different speeds and rhythms of intensity (Braidotti 2006: 139-40).

Thus, Braidotti is dealing with ever-shifting ‘subject-positions in terms of accountability, ethical values and collective bonds’ (Braidotti 2006: 140) rather than creation of new identities or identifications. Braidotti’s conception of the subject is Deleuzian and characterised as a site or field of assemblages of external relations or forces (Braidotti 2006: 160). Consciousness, then, is to Braidotti not an essential and inward-looking ‘I’, but rather an ever-changing assemblage of interconnections and relations. Rather than identity, Braidotti theorises intensity.

Ethically, this means for whiteness and white Europeanness firstly that European identity needs to be reworked so as to realise its constructedness and racialised whiteness. Methodologically, nomadic intensity works to undo the hegemonic tendencies of Europeanness while keeping in mind the history of the continent so as to take responsibilities and remain accountable (Braidotti 2006: 75). Braidotti’s theories of the nomadic subject thus add the concept of memory and history, which is crucial when theorising about white Europeanness and relations to others and to which I will return in the next chapter.

The self-other relation seems to be made up of two points of potentially productive ethical shifts around the other in epistemological, political and ethical terms. The first point is ‘relation’. Most of the thinkers dealing with otherness as an ethical necessity are thinking in terms of ‘not-one’.²⁷ To de Beauvoir the other is the condition for the ethical turn of the self and Braidotti continuously refer to a collective consciousness-raising as an ethico-political movement towards change. The point is not that one needs to understand the other fully but rather that there is room for opacity of relations (Glissant 1997: 193). Transparency, postcolonial poet Glissant argues, calls for reduction of the other to something graspable and close to the self. Glissant’s ethical project is also one of standpoint and situational recognition, but the need to know the other completely is missing. It is a project of the senses and may urge the subject to

27 Luce Irigaray developed most famously the notion of the sex which is not one in This Sex which is Not One (1985). But as mentioned above the idea of interdependency and interconnectedness was already present in the thoughts of de Beauvoir. I want to use the concept here in a broader sense of otherness.

embrace the donner avec²⁸ or the opaqueness of cultural manifestations and mutations in order not to fix them. With Glissant’s poetics we moreover reach the second point, which is creative affirmation. A definition of the other is always escaping the self and it is futile to attempt to name the other or to ask for recognition by the other or categorise him or her in identity formations. The point is to go with the opaque proximity, the intensity of the relation as a site of transformation of both self and other. Rather the ethical turn of acknowledgement of collectivity forges non-reductionist understanding of the other always already part of – and a condition for – the self. This results methodologically in the rejection of self-other binary thought and the adoption of more complex forms of accounting for self-other relations.

This point introduces the positive openness towards the other and the production as creativity (Critchley 2007) and affirmative change. ‘Creative affirmation’ is also a space of the sensuous or sensory and a generative force of creating affirmative politics from painful histories and power relations. These relations and creative affirmations of course need to be seen in the context of cultural and societal realities. They connect people through different means of communication and in the following chapters I will be using journalism as a case in point to flesh out the relation on a larger globalised scale.

In the following chapter I will examine the extent to which journalism serves as a practice of relation and creative affirmation in relation to the other. I analyse journalism as a practice of relation between people and other entities and discuss how this practice may look in a globalised ethical multiple relation. The journalistic practice of the concepts of ‘objectivity’ and ‘freedom of speech’ is, as previously stated in this chapter, founded on a reduction of the other to the same as the self. In order to see journalism as a potential practice of relation and creative affirmation I firstly argue for a deconstruction of the aforementioned concepts and secondly connect this journalism of relation to a larger supra-national and cultural realm.

Critiquing the moralistic and universalist assumptions of whiteness in ideas of cosmopolitanism I am moreover discussing the re-configuration of the concept of

28 The idea of Edouard Glissant (1997) and his concept of donner-avec is translated as ‘giving-on-and-with’. The term ‘understanding’ may be useful here though without the connotations of transparency in relation to the object of knowledge.

cosmopolitanism which departs from the claims of morality and instead bases its global span on ethical and multiple self-other relation.