Mari Ruti, Associate Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Toronto, will give a lecture on post-Lacanian and post-Levinasian ethics. All are invited to attend.
In his 2008 book, intimacies, Leo Bersani argues that if we refused to approach others through the lens of their psychological particularity, or through categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, or nationality, we would discover that what is different about them is merely the envelope of a more profound “sameness.” This turn to “sameness” is a paradigm shift that characterizes a number of recent efforts to rethink ethics and progressive politics in the context of posthumanist theory. After decades of theorizing about difference, alterity, and otherness, critics are increasingly deploying the trope of sameness – and even of universality – to envision how we might ethically relate to those who seem fundamentally incomprehensible to us. The talk juxtaposes Judith Butler’s notion of constitutive human precariousness with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek’s call for a situation-specific universalism – a universalism which would bypass the political problems that have plagued the universalism of Western rational humanism. Despite the obvious disagreements between these thinkers, all of them imply that, when it comes to interpersonal ethics, what human beings share with each other is more important than what divides them. My aim is to unpack the theoretical implications of this agreement, along with some of the problems and new lines of inquiry that arise from it.
Mari Ruti holds degrees from Brown University, Harvard University, and the University of Toronto. At Toronto, she teaches contemporary theory, psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and feminist and queer theory. Ruti is author of several academic books including Reinventing the Soul: Posthumanist Theory and Psychic Life (2006), The Summons of Love (2009), The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (2012), and two mainstream books, The Case for Falling in Love: Why We Can’t Master the Madness of Love – and Why That’s the Best Part (2011) and The Call of Character (forthcoming 2013).
Monday, April 15 at 7:00pm to 8:00pm | Hollander Hall, 241
On April 16, she will lead a discussion over lunch, “Against All Odds: How Your Own Character Can Come Through in the Classroom.” Hardy House Living Room, 12:30.
Co-sponsored by the Davis Center, the Program in Comparative Literature, the Departments of English, Philosophy and Religion, and the Program in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies.