Auto-affection and Ethics

Abstract

This essay starts with the possibility of situating Derrida’s aporetic ethics in the domain of normative ethics and argues that Derrida’s reflection on ethics is enrooted in the specific way he conceives the phenomenological notion of auto-affection. In the second section, I analyze, in the early work, auto-affection with signs and show its centrality in Derrida’s first encounter with Levinas’s philosophy. Derrida refuses to substitute the hetero-affective relation to the Other for auto-affection as the source of universal law and normativity. He does not sacrifice universality and tackles the problem of autonomous ethical decision-making even though he welcomes through affectivity the signification of the singular other, which is irreducible to conceptual, emotive, and normative self-relation. This background helps us understand the rootedness of ethical aporias in a reflection on auto-affection.

Keywords:

• Jacques Derrida
• Emmanuel Levinas
• ethics
• auto-affection
• self
• other

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In Ethics and Infinity, Levinas says that he is interested in the meaning of ethics rather than founding an ethics (90). The same can be true for Derrida. Whether or not that interest can be qualified as “meta-ethical” remains open to debate.

2 According to Michael Smith, moral nihilism conceives the world “as value-free and so devoid of any moral nature.” If, as moral thought and talk presuppose, “obligatoriness, rightness, and wrongness are features of acts,” and “the value-free nature of the world demands a reform of our moral practice.” We should “not continue to assert falsehoods once we know them to be false, we must rather refrain from asserting them at all, or else justify the pretense that the falsehoods are true” (Smith 18).