Radical Ethics in Time of Plague

ABSTRACT

What literary and philosophical resources can help us situate ourselves ethically during and after plague time? Returning to Camus’ The Plague provides a thoughtful entry to the timeless time of COVID-19. Isabel Wilkerson describes and challenges white supremacy as plague and caste system, both blatant and in its less obvious (to whites) forms. Emmanuel Levinas and Knud Ejler Løgstrup bring us the priority of the other and an ethic of responsibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Colonialism
• slavery
• plague
• climate
• ethics
• racism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ I write “implicated” rather than “implied” here because Løgstrup seems to imply, as does Levinas, that the other’s vulnerability accuses me, implicates me.

² I am grateful to Eric Severson for reminding me of this.

³ (Levinas, 1977), for example.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donna M. Orange

Educated in philosophy, clinical psychology and psychoanalysis, Donna M. Orange, Ph.D., Psy.D., teaches at NYU Postdoc (New York); IPSS (Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York); and in private study groups. She also offers clinical consultation/supervision in these institutes and beyond. Recent books are Thinking for Clinicians: Philosophical Resources for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies (2010), The Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for Everyday Clinical Practice (2011), Nourishing the Inner Life of Clinicians and Humanitarians: The Ethical Turn in Psychoanalysis (2016), Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics (2016), and most recently, Psychoanalysis, History, and Radical Ethics: Learning to Hear (2020). She is 2021 Visiting Professor of Phenomenology, Duquesne University.