From Ethics to the Politics of Aesthethics

Abstract

The chapter begins by exploring some of the shortcomings of Levinasian ethics by highlighting its suspicion of aesthetics, the emphasis it places on pre-ontological ethics, the required proximity of the “face” of the Other and the limitations attached to the obliteration of the Self. As the chapter discusses these shortcomings, it progressively introduces Greig’s theatre engagement with ethics. Subsequently, Rodríguez offers a discussion of ethics and aesthetics by reference to Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of relational aesthetics as well as Clare Bishop’s critique of the term, alongside her suspicion of the ethical turn, shared with philosophers Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek. Aesthethics, a term Rodríguez borrows from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, is then used to describe Greig’s theatre’s interrelation with “reality” and what Rodríguez calls the wounded aesthetic strategies of Greig’s theatre. The potential impact of those strategies is what Rodríguez terms the politics of aesthethics of Greig’s holed theatre.