| dc.description.abstract | This project brings Victorian literature and twentieth-century moral philosophy into conversation to argue that thinking about ethics also implies thinking about subjectivity. The critique of Enlightenment subjectivity as ideologically prioritizing white male sovereignty need not shut down as necessarily problematic any thinking about subjectivity. Rather, such critique actually presupposes a foundational normative commitment to the value of human life as an end in itself, to a minimal ethical subjectivity that exceeds both natural determinism and the contents of any particular norms. Building from Kant’s wonder at how the categorical imperative is unconditioned by either natural causes or derivative hypothetical imperatives, I explore how nineteenth-century literary and twentieth-century moral philosophical discourses articulate and revalue a foundational normative commitment to this excess of ethical subjectivity. Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Marilynne Robinson defamiliarize the experiences of thought’s plurality, conscience’s face-to-face responsibility, and freedom not as sovereignty but as ethical obligation. They acknowledge this ethical subjectivity as anomalous in the natural universe, inspiring wonder, an excess that, itself ungrounded, grounds any other particular norms. This philosophical context illuminates how, against nineteenth-century disenchantment narratives, key Victorian thinkers of ethics affirm their commitment to the anomalous wonder of ethical subjectivity, offering an implicit standard whence to critique dehumanizing ideologies. I examine four writers—Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, George Eliot, and Olive Schreiner—tracing their contradictions and potentialities to show their commitment to this anomalous ethical subjectivity as wonderous and intrinsically valuable, and how this commitment implicitly justifies our critiquing those moments when they betray their own ethics by falling into exclusionary ideologies. My situating these authors in a longer trajectory of commitment to this excessive ethical subjectivity demonstrates how an interdisciplinary, deconstructive approach facilitates reflection on our own commitment to a minimal, exceeding ethical subjectivity that implicitly grounds and motivates our own critical practices. I suggest the continuing need for moral philosophical language and literary narratives that value the wonder of ethical subjectivity. | |
