ABSTRACT
Tobin Siebers attempts to analyse the (often unacknowledged) force of the ethical as it stubbornly persists in contemporary linguistic criticism, in the New Criticism which precedes and partially legitimates it, in the work of Derrida and de Man, of Nietzsche and René Girard, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, in feminism and in contemporary ‘nuclear criticism’. Siebers’ claim that all these forms of criticism are ethical, whether they know it or not, resembles and obviously to some degree jumps together with the more regularly advanced claim that all interpretation is political. Both ethics and politics have to do with questions of goodness, justice and right and wrong actions. But for Siebers the ethical is to be distinguished from the political in that it inevitably coheres round and depends upon a notion of human character, or, to put it another way, upon a notion of the subject. Siebers asks us to take seriously the derivation of the word ‘ethics’ from the Greek ethos (which he translates as ‘moral character’), since he believes that ethical questions are always questions of goodness and right for the moral individual. All criticism, even that criticism which attempts to deny the integrity of the subject, has ethical orientations and investments which imply some ideal of ethical character.
