Abstract
In the two canzoni constituting “A”-9, Zukofsky juxtaposes love against a reified objectification or rationalization of the world. Love acts as a counterforce to the instrumental rationality of capitalism, an ethical stance against an imperialistic ontologization of the world. This juxtaposition of the ethical against the reified is the product of a Marxist critique of social relations in capitalist society as static and reifying. Zukofsky plainly considered Marxism the foundation of a theory of ethical relations, based on a critique of bourgeois interests and their concept of freedom. In a letter to Ezra Pound dated July 11, 1936, he writes on the issue of ethics:
Ethics: There is enough ethics in Communist Manifesto: Capital is not a personal, it is a social “power,” & realizing the consequences of that statement is what that statement <the Manifesto> is about. Chap II of Manifesto is all ethics, if you’re willing to read. The “free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” is as good as Confucius tho not “received from the sky.” In fact, that’s the only ethic on which any decent civilization can continue. Marx’s “different people are not equal one to another” “but to make the exploitation by one man of many impossible” is enough ethical basis to start any decent govt. now. If you really understood Marx “equal right… bourgeoisie right… presupposes inequality” you wdn’t ask if communism proposes to have Any ethics.1
For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live…. In the end the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.
—T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia
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Notes
Mark Scroggins, Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 225.
Bernard Williams concludes his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985) by stating that “in one sense, the primacy of the individual and of personal disposition is a necessary truth…” (201);
while G. E. Moore in Principia Ethica (1903; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971) considered “Ethics [to be] undoubtedly concerned with the question of what good conduct is” (2).
Emmanuel Levinas, “Language and Proximity,” Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1987), 124.
Barry Ahearn, Zukofsky’s Ä An Introduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 30–32; 147–49.
E. A. Wallis Budge, ed., The Book of the Dead 3 vols., vol. 1 (1910; London: Arkana, 1985), lxiii.
See Mark C. Taylor’s discussion of death and writing in the work of Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida in Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 297–98.
See also Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 17 and 208 where he makes the same pun on “en-graving” as Zukofsky.
See a discussion of the importance of love in Levinas’ thinking in Tina Chanter, “Feminism and the Other,” in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, eds. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), 43–44.
For a discussion of the role of justice, see Luk Bouckaert, “Ontology and Ethics: Reflections on Levinas’ Critique of Heidegger,” International Philosophical Quarterly 10 (1970): 402–19.
I owe much of my outline of Levinas at this point to Steven Gans’ succinct article, “Ethics or Ontology: Levinas and Heidegger,” Philosophy Today 16.2 (1972): 117–21.
Similar questions are raised in a discussion of Derrida’s analysis of Levinas’ affiliation to Heidegger in Robert Bernasconi, “Deconstruction and the Possibility of Ethics,” in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 122–39.
Ron Silliman, “Why the MLA Can’t Read,” The New Sentence (New York: Roof, 1987), 142–47.
Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” in Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 350.
Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), 22.
See Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 79–153;
Rudolph J. Gerber, “Totality and Infinity: He-braism and Hellenism—The Experiential Ontology of Emmanuel Levinas,” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 7 (1967): 177–88;
Shira Wolosky, “Derrida, Jabès, Levinas: Sign-Theory as Ethical Discourse,” Proof-texts: AJournal of Jewish Literary History 2 (1982): 283–302.
See Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,” The Dialectic of Enlightenment trans. John Cumming, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1987), 43–80
Paul Smith, Pound Revised (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1983), 133–54.
This exegetical process is well demonstrated in Michele J. Leggott, Reading Zukofiky’s “80 Flowers” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
Thorlief Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek, trans. Jules L. Moreau (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954), 65.
See Jacques Derrida, “The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 175–205 where the copula describes relations and not appellations. Consider a related passage in Adorno’s attack on Heidegger’s ontological philosophy in ND: 100–104.
Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Fragments of 1844,” Marx and Engels: 1843–44 vol. 3 of Karl Marx/Frederick Engels. Collected Works 45 vols. to date, ed. Jack Cohen, et al. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975–91), 304.
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© 2002 Tim Woods
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Woods, T. (2002). Ethos or Ontos? Modes of Subjectivity in Levinas and Zukofsky. In: The Poetics of the Limit. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-03920-0_6
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