GLITS Graduate Conference

Mindful of Otherness: Literature and Ethics, 13 June 2009

To respond to the demand of the literary work as the demand of the other is to attend to it as a unique event whose happening is a call, a challenge, an obligation: understand how little you understand me (Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 2005).

Ethics is not simply a reverent openness to the Other, but a question of, say, formulating policies on advertising or infanticide which affect those whom one does not know. It is not devalued by being thematised (Terry Eagleton, Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics, 2009).

Call for Papers: Introducing the Debate

The conception of ethics as ‘responsibility to otherness’ has been particularly prominent in literary studies since the so-called ‘return to ethics’ that was a feature of French thought in the late 1970s. With this approach, alertness to the impenetrability of meaning in a text provokes respect for that which is unknown in the other person. This view of ethics is oriented around the category of ‘the other’ - a category that has met with recent resistance.

In recent years, prominent voices have contested the ‘ethics of otherness’ in the name of ethics based on ‘universal truths’ and the ‘subject’. Where it was once radical for literary studies to affirm the dissolution of subjectivity, the stability of the subject is now being upheld. Where ‘particularity’ was once in vogue, the ‘universal’ is now the buzzword. The ‘impossibility of truth’ is gradually being eclipsed by ‘Truth’ claims.

The Goldsmiths Literature and Ethics Conference acknowledged a crisis in the ethics of otherness. We invited papers addressing the following: what does the backlash against literary theory mean for the ethics of literature? How will it change the way we read literary texts? How have recent critiques of literary theory and ‘the other’ affected both the reading and writing of literature? Are we witnessing a return to the literary representation of moral truths or a different ‘ethical’ form of writing?

The conference staged both sides of the debate, with some papers defending the ‘ethics of otherness’ and other papers critiquing it - arguing for ethics predicated upon ‘truth’.

The Conference

Plenary speech: Robert Eaglestone

Professor Robert Eaglestone works on contemporary and twentieth century philosophy, literature and literary theory. His publications include Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), Doing English (London: Routledge, 1999, 2nd ed 2002), Postmodernism and Holocaust Denial (Cambridge: Icon, 2001). He is the series editor of Routledge Critical Thinkers.

Crisis in ethics

Literature has always been involved with ethics, but an ‘ethical turn’ took place in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, Eaglestone claimed. This ‘crisis’ in ethics had a complex melange of causes. The first major factor was cultural change. The happy ‘60s was followed by the manic positivism of the ‘70s, which was followed by the nihilism of the ‘80s. The ‘90s marked a reaction to the earlier decades, a sense that morality had been overlooked. The second major factor was political change. Mao’s Cultural Revolution resulted in the withering away of Marxist beliefs and rethinking of ethical frameworks. Whereas Marxism was popular in the 1960s and ‘70s, it was increasingly discredited in the late ‘80s and ‘90s. People became disillusioned with systems of thought; soon, the suggestion that no framework offered an answer emerged – a suggestion clumsily summed up by the term ‘postmodernism’. The ‘ethics of postmodernism’ is associated with diverse concepts, said Eaglestone: ‘play nice and be good’; the system is impossible; the world consists of a complex series of interactions; the inexplicable stimulates the desire for system.

Emmanuel Levinas

Eaglestone offered a breakdown of Levinas’s ethical thought (1906-1995). First, Levinas’s approach is phenomenological, influenced by his mentor Martin Heidegger. Phenomenology is the mode of inquiry based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human consciousness. Second, Levinas doesn’t provide a new system of ethics or rules; rather, he offers ‘meta-ethics’, he questions what obligation to the other means. Third, in Levinas’s conception, the subject is always already aware of the other and thus inherently ethical.

The turn against Levinas

Eaglestone asked: what was the turn against Levinas?

First, literary studies are in part fashion driven, Eaglestone noted. Levinas’s theory simply went out of fashion. Here, Eaglestone made the point that literature is unique because it is indefinable, the ‘chimerical object’. Thus we should be wary of approaching literature according to the latest fashionable mode. 

Second, Eaglestone asked, did Levinas’s ethics simply run out of steam? Levinas doesn’t say very much about art explicitly. The late Levinas suggests that art put us in contact with the transcendent, but only in the form of ‘play’. Was there simply not much else that could be said about Levinas in relation to literature?

Third, New Aestheticism, or the ‘School of Singularity’ experienced a bifurcation between those who critically engaged with art and those who conceived of art for art’s sake. Amid the conflict, the question of ethics fell away.

Fourth, Levinas was attacked on religious grounds. Gillian Rose and Alain Badiou, among others, suggested that Levinas’s other is a cover for the divine other. According to Badiou, there is nothing in the other that creates the guarantee of responsibility; for Badiou, ethics requires an axiom and in Levinas this is the ‘altogether other’ which is another term for God. ‘Levinas’s ethics is a category of pious discourse,’ says Badiou. But according to Eaglestone, Badiou overlooked the rupture of the other in Otherwise than Being. Moreover, Badiou’s argument takes the form of: ‘If it doesn’t work on my terms it doesn’t work.’ Axioms are crucial for Badiou’s philosophy, but axioms are not crucial to Levinas’s phenomenological thought.

Levinas and the political

Eaglestone addressed the question of politics in Levinas. Slavoj Zizek and Gillian Rose have claimed that Levinas fails to take account of practical politics. Yet Howard Caygill defends Levinas, arguing that his ethics is tied to the question of how we live in the polis (Levinas and the Political, 2002). Simon Critchley also responds to Zizek; while for Zizek, ‘ethics without politics is empty’, for Critchley, ‘politics without ethics is blind.’ Eaglestone argued that the question of the relationship between ethics and politics in Levinas depends on how we define the political. If by ‘politics’ we mean ‘political foundations’ then Levinas’s thought may be irrelevant. But if by ‘politics’ we mean ‘how we live with other people’ then Levinas’s ethics is significant; his conception of ‘multiple encounters with others’ is concerned with sociality. Eaglestone’s question – what do we mean by politics – caused him to turn to an ongoing debate between Critchley and Zizek. For Critchley, politics is not about programmes, but invention and contingency; politics is about local, dirty, practical work. Critchley claims that Zizek’s radical left politics is seductive because it is dramatic; from Zizek’s revolutionary perspective, local practical work is dull and not dramatic enough.

Levinas and literature 

Finally, Eaglestone raised the question of whether we can carry out a Levinasian reading of literature, given Levinas’s ambivalence about the role of art in ethics. Would a Levinasian reading mean attending to the otherness of texts or would we lose the otherness in the process of discerning it. Is the literary other comparable to the human other?

Paper synopses

The first panel examined literary presentations of otherness and determinate ethical truths.

‘Epistolarity as Mindful of Otherness and Reciprocity in J. M. Coetzee and

John Berger’: Rachel Bower ( University of Cambridge )

Rachel Bower considered how uses of the epistolary form in contemporary literature demand an engagement with the ‘other’ while simultaneously insisting upon reciprocity, identification and empathy. By examining several contemporary texts, including J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron (1990) and Disgrace (1999) and John Berger’s From A to X (2008) Bower’s paper explored the way in which the epistolary form engages with and complicates the possibility of an ethics of otherness, moving towards the possibility of a ‘critical humanism’, which challenges a politics of difference without losing its responsibility to otherness.

The paper argued that the ‘other’ - as the addressee, recipient, internal and external reader - is crucial to the epistolary form. Critics have argued that the lack of authorial voice in the epistolary form results in the loss of truth, an ‘endless destabilising desire,’ and final celebration of openness. However, Bower argued that such criticism neglects the role of the addressee; through the addressee, the epistolary simultaneously demands connection, interpretation, response, and insists on presenting a voice for understanding. Among other examples, Bower claimed that the single letter exchange in Disgrace refuses reconciliation while insisting on reciprocity.  Bower considers this an act of reaching out to understand another in the face of the incomprehensible/unutterable; it also challenges the privileging of difference, particularly in the aftermath of a brutal system of classification and imposed difference, as in post-apartheid South Africa.

‘The Ethical Space of Hospitality in Raymond Carver’: Catherine Humble

(Goldsmiths, University of London )

At the beginning of Raymond Carver’s ‘Cathedral’, the narrator awaits the arrival of a blind man to his home: ‘A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.’ Presenting the unfamiliar, the guest threatens to disrupt the protagonist’s sense of identity, to open up his guarded interiority to the outside. By the close of the story, however, the narrator and the visitor sit side by side, their fingers entwined: ‘He found my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his hand over my hand.’ In the dark of night, the two characters tentatively draw a picture together – of a kind of ‘house’ with ‘spires’, ‘flying buttresses’, ‘great doors’, ‘windows with arches.’

The paper asked: what forges the transition from the rejection of the stranger to the welcome of the other as friend? How is the bounded home opened up to the outside? Why is there a shift away from the solitary figure within the home to a communion of beings that revolves around a different kind of home?

The paper considered hospitality in Carver with regards to Levinas’s account of responsibility to the Other, via a close reading of their respective works - ‘Cathedral’ and The Dwelling. The paper examined the relation between self and other and how this is played out in terms of the inside and outside of the home, of language, and of visuality. The focus was on the relationship between immanence and transcendence, the finite and infinite, in Carver and Levinas.

Challenging common conceptions of Carver as a purely ‘realist’ writer, the paper argued that in Carver the concrete is dependent on the transcendental. Conversely, Levinas is misrepresented as a philosopher of the infinite. Reading Levinas through the concrete materiality of Carver’s fiction, the paper demonstrated that his ethical thought is bound to the empirical; contrary to critical opinion, Levinas offers a ‘creaturely ethics’ – an ethics of the everyday.

‘The Literae in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Barthes’ A Lover’s

Discourse: Isabelle Zahar (Birkbeck, University of London )

Among the many types of lovers’ discourses explored by Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, the spectral presence of the epistle is never far away, accompanying the affair with an enigmatic status. Despite taking up relatively little of the poem’s verse, the lovers’ final letters of complaint ‘re-write’ and re-focalise much of their narrated text. Given the reader’s foreknowledge of outcome of the affair and the inevitable futility of the epistolary composition, what purpose might be served by Chaucer’s inclusion of the literae?

In Troilus and Criseyde, the poem’s reader is confronted with love’s precariousness and equivocations. The narrative in which love revolves around a mutually-inscribed image is challenged by the lovers’ epistles, invoking Roland Barthes’ re-reading of Romantic love in A Lover’s Discourse.

The paper asked whether the ways in which medieval discourses of love centred on textuality might be linked to the historical development of a twentieth century account of subjectivity that sees ethics as bound to otherness. The paper argued that inherent to the western literary presentation of love is ‘the singularity of the other’ that drives desire, but also the doomed subsuming of difference into sameness. Although such terminology carries contemporary inflections, the challenge posed to otherness in the contest between aspired comm-union and misapprehended unity is rooted in the middle ages.

Session 2: Ethics and aesthetics

This panel engaged in recent debates in continental philosophy concerning ethics and literature.

‘The Point of No Return: Redefining Universality in Contemporary French

 Theory’: Rok Benčin ( Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts)

In contemporary theory notions such as universality, subject and truth can now be detected – notions that were seemingly abolished by the theories we can unite under the labels ‘poststructuralism’ and ‘postmodernism’.

Benčin’s paper discussed how to conceive this apparent 'return' to ‘truth’ and the ‘subject’. The paper asked: is this simply a matter of alternation between two ahistorical currents of thought - one preferring particularity, the other universality? Or are the new conceptualisations of universality based on the critical reading of established theories of particularity? Is there a return to previously criticised notions of truth and universality or is there a thorough rethinking of postmodern thought, noticing its inner problems but nevertheless acknowledging its ‘point of no return’ - meaning that we can no longer go back to any of the previous notions of universality?

Concentrating on the work of Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière – key contributors to the critique of postmodern conceptions of particularity, otherness and the primacy of ethics – the paper outlined the most important arguments led to attempts at redefining notions such as universality, subject and truth.

Badiou’s ‘inaesthetics’ is based on the philosophy of immanence, but the kind of immanence that produces an ‘errant excess’ over itself. For Badiou, an ‘event’ can occur, destabilising all solid ties, resulting in a radical undecidability. The paper explained that the subject of the event is not a de-subjectivised guardian of otherness, but a being that becomes the subject of the act of a political decision.

The paper showed how for Rancière, the art can only be reached by something that has nothing ‘proper’ to it. Thus the autonomy of art coincides with radical heteronomy.

The paper pursued the following thesis: the only veritable return to the concepts of universality, subject and truth is a return that has nothing to return to, but constructs new conceptions, starting from the deadlocks of postmodern thought.

What I Know Now: Knowledge, Time and Aesthetics in Levinas and Appelfeld

Adi Drori-Avraham (Goldsmiths, University of London )

Levinas has a strange, somewhat puzzling attitude towards aesthetics, the paper claimed. Throughout Levinas’s work, his attitude varies from a simple lack of interest to quite an open suspicion, even hostility towards the category of the aesthetic. On the other hand, Levinas’s writings are dotted with references to Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and the notion of tragedy. Levinas also wrote short essays about Proust and Agnon among others. The paper argued that while Levinas seems to think there is something about aesthetics – the ideology of the aesthetic – that cannot accommodate an ethical relation with the absolute other, there is also a sense that this ideology can be challenged, or interrupted, from within aesthetics, by literature and language.

The paper raised the following questions: what exactly is interrupted? Why? What does Levinas mean by the interruption of literature by aesthetics? What is the meaning of this interruption? The paper claimed that what we are looking for is not a sort of ethical imperative of literature, an ethical demand from literature as such – because such an imperative would be alien to the Levinasian project. Instead of formulation, which is arguably the role of the philosopher, the Levinasian approach to literature demands vigilance, vigilance on the side of the critic and reader. The paper demonstrated this vigilance of ethical reading via a consideration of Aharon Appelfeld novel Laish.

Understanding Alterity: Beckett and Levinas; Philosophy and Literature: Sean Roberts

(Birkbeck, University of London )

Sean Roberts’ paper asked how the work of Samuel Beckett can help us to respond to the current ‘crisis of in the ethics of otherness’.  Taking a cue from Adorno’s essay ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, Roberts argued that the various attempts to ‘understand the meaning of Beckett’s meaninglessness’ have been largely unsuccessful – insofar as they have failed to provide convincing accounts of the ethical implications of the relationship between understanding and (literary) alterity. They do not provide adequate responses to Gibson’s ‘insistent question’: ‘How can I read, and write about my reading, in a manner that preserves the singularity, the unforeseeability, and, with them, the ethics of the encounter as event?’.  The readings of Beckett have been largely unsuccessful, the paper argued, because they depend upon various commonplace assumptions about the role of thematics in understanding the ethical implications of literature.

Roberts argued that the response to the current crisis in ethics requires a certain ‘rehabilitation’ of the notion of thematics or, to use an equally loaded term, ‘content’. The paper claimed that this rehabilitation can be usefully informed by what Levinas has to say about the relationship between philosophy and the/its other. 

Roberts didn’t offer a defence of Levinas against the widely expounded arguments about the extent to which his philosophy is underpinned by his theology. Rather, he suggested that the emphasis on Levinasian ‘illeity’ (by his ‘supporters’, ‘opponents’ and by Levinas himself) has resulted in a degree of negligence regarding what he actually says about the role of philosophy in maintaining the ethically responsible relationship with alterity. The paper demonstrated that when due attention is paid to this element of Levinas’s thought, it can be seen to offer a far more nuanced and fertile account of the relationship between ethics, literature and alterity, than he is generally given credit for.

Session 3:  The human threshold

This panel considered the debate between otherness and ethical truths in relation to the human and inhuman.

‘Joyce, Derrida and the Ethics of the Animal Other’: Luke Martin

( University of York )

Luke Martin’s paper contested Alain Badiou’s argument that the notion of the ethical other should be abandoned. Martin sought to reread conventional philosophical notions of the animal other (in the work of Heidegger, Levinas, Lacan), which fail to recognize the animal as anything other than a homogenous category. Instead, Martin recast our encounters with animals as singular events, which allow us to better understand ourselves. Specifically, the paper applied the recent work of Jacques Derrida on the subject of animal alterity, as in The Animal That Therefore I Am, to the various encounters with dogs, cats and horses in James Joyce's Ulysses.

In Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, Derrida interrogates Heidegger's anthropocentric conception of animal alterity and attempts to find a continuum between animals and humans. Where Heidegger makes no real distinction between animals and non-human objects, since both have no spirit, Derrida sees the animal's lack of spirit as a mode of its being-able-to-have spirit. For Derrida, it is possible to have a more complicated ethical relationship with the animal other than Heidegger permits. The paper examined this attitude in relation to depictions of the horse in the ‘Eumeus’ episode of Ulysses and the dog in ‘Proteus’.

In ‘And Say the Animal Responded?’ Derrida suggests that in Lacan’s thought the signifier requires another locus to be understood (what Levinas might term the ‘third party’) - the ahuman, the animal other. In light of this, Martin argued that the cat which interacts with Bloom in the ‘Calypso’ episode of Ulysses is a prime example of the Lacanian ahuman other - an other which is partly constructed by Bloom in order to understand his own thought processes.

‘The Call of the Other: The Ethics of Reading Abortion as Poetic Rhetoric’: Natalie Jones ( University of Birmingham )

If we are faced with an ethical crisis over the status of the ‘other’ in literary criticism, on which side of the debate would a consideration of abortion lie, as both literary topic and rhetorical figure? In such a context, how do we define the ‘other’, and justify our conceptualization as the most valid or legitimate?

Natalie Jones argued that abortion may be a crucial theoretical issue that complicates the seemingly straightforward divide between a ‘mindfulness’ and a ‘wariness’ of otherness, refusing any simple ethical and aesthetic resolution.

In John Lennard’s The Poetry Handbook the topic of abortion is used to illustrate a scholarly shortfall in a 1993 Cambridge exam paper, in which students are criticised by Lennard for being both too ethically involved in an analysis of poems about abortion, and equally too critically distant from the texts, unwilling to express personal opinion.  For Jones, this critical tightrope walk demonstrates what is at stake within contemporary textual analysis, raising the question: to what extent do our ethical standpoints cohere or diverge with our aesthetic and rhetorical analysis?

Focusing specifically on the rhetorical device of apostrophe, Jones considered several key poems that demonstrate the way in which abortion confuses the very ethics and stability of otherness as a category of analysis, while arguing that the return of ‘liberal humanism’ is also problematic. Critics such as Mary Poovey have shown that liberal humanism cannot accommodate the pregnant condition. In essence, the paper argued that struggle over priority of otherness or universality in literature and ethics is undermined by a state such as pregnancy, in which the very notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ are collapsed.

‘The Origins of AIDS Narratives and the Textual Reconceptualisation of the Other’: Michael O’Brien ( University of Glasgow )  

O’Brien problematised some of the conference’s key questions, by locating issues of selfhood and otherness within Queer culture, asking if the formation of Queer as a performance or masquerade signifies a death of the repressed gay Other?  In part, the paper answered this question by considering the AIDS crisis (focusing on its origins in the early 1980s), highlighting the textual interplay between the association of homosexuality as Other and the construction of a new queer subject produced by this virus.

The paper asked whether one form of otherness is replaced with another: do assumptions about sexual abnormality give way to bodily abnormality?

By critiquing the memoir writing of key AIDS activists, such as Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time, Edmond White’s The Farewell Symphony, and Larry Kramer’s Notes from the Holocaust, O’Brien asked if AIDS can be read within the context of a paradigmatic shift in Queer history between post-Stonewall liberation of the gay Other and the 1980s culture of sexual policing, asking if it is possible to read these narratives as signifying the birth of the contemporary queer subject, who uses discourse to rewrite or ‘other’ the social position of gay men. O’Brien asked: does the Queer subject regard himself as ‘other’ or is otherness something which is inscribed upon Queer identity amid the early years of AIDS? 

Session 4: Ethical transformations

This panel examined how debates surrounding otherness and ethical truths impact upon transformations – in politics, ethnic identity, art form and history.

‘The Monstrous Other Returns: Embodying the New Monstrosity in

Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow’: Amy Rushton (Goldsmiths, University of London )

In a recent Guardian news article, it was reported that Tendai Beti, the finance minister of Zimbabwe’s current power sharing government, had commented that Robert Mugabe is in fact ‘a British gentleman in a proper Victorian sense.’ Although Beti presumably said this in jest, the report then goes on to quote from Heidi Holland, a Zimbabwean-born journalist who has interviewed Mugabe extensively:

Mugabe grew up in the colonial era. One of the reasons he's been so angry and is still so angry is that he’s been rejected by the British. […] The real problem is that he tries to be both an African and a Brit and he can’t pull it off because they are parallel people and they despise each other.

Amy Rushton’s paper asked: why should Mugabe feel both ‘an African and a Brit’? And how could that have influenced his behaviour as a political leader in post-independent Africa? Rushton argued that Holland’s comment on Mugabe’s psychological predicament serves as a real-life illustration of the double bind of otherness that is fictionally portrayed in the most recent novel by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow (published in 2006).

A native of Kenya and one of the most renowned writers to emerge from sub-Saharan Africa since the colonial period ended, Ngugi wa Thiong’o believes that writing is – and should be – a political act to inspire and achieve social change. The paper explored the relationship between otherness and politics – how the ethical other relates to political action.

Rushton discussed how the figure of ‘the Other’, a familiar trope in postcolonial literary criticism, is satirically and subversively re-appropriated by Ngugi. The paper argued that Wizard of the Crow demonstrates the potent legacy of psychological conditioning, even decades after colonisation, by emphasizing the ‘monstrous’ metaphorically and literally in its corrupt political characters.

‘Bringing the Other to the Qasida: Ethical Issues in Adapting a Classic Arab Poetry Form’: Ren Katherine Powell ( University of Lancaster )

Today the pre-Islamic or classical qasida is held to be one of the greatest art forms of the Arab world. The qasida is a lyric poem whose tripartite structure reveals a narrative that, through ritual-like performance, established or reinforced the psychological and social positioning of the persona within his community. The content of the tripartite is conveyed through associative leaps, relying on intertextual participation on the part of the audience. Through this active listening, the audience shares the experience, thus approaching the narrative on a level closer to Aristotle’s ‘truth’.

However, the qasida is gender specific in its experience. It is a poetry form written by men and for men: while female figures exist within these poems, the female psyche does not. Powell’s paper looked at the issues a postmodern feminist poet faces when attempting to adapt and celebrate the qasida’s unique associative narrative elements. Does the contemporary interpretation have to subvert the gender prescriptions and sexual attitudes inherent in the form or stay faithful to their truths? Powell’s paper asked whether the translation and adaptation of the literary form opens up the text to otherness or to universal truths.

‘Ekphrasis and Ethics in Auden’s Musée Des Beaux Arts’: Edward Quipp ( University of Edinburgh )

W. H. Auden’s ‘Musée Des Beaux Arts’, written on the cusp of global conflict in December 1938, represented the culmination of his habitual anxiety about the relationship between the experience of art and the ethical moment. Was art capable of generating universal ethical insights? Was the striving for universality the only viable intervention it could make, in a time of global conflagration? How does art fail in its pursuit of ethical affectivity, and what might success look like?

Quipp’s paper presented the concerns of Auden in the later thirties as a historical case-study of the tension between ‘particularist’ ethical aesthetics and a ‘universal’ alternative. Recent theoretical wrestling over the validity of Otherness should not be viewed as an emergence without precedent, Quipp argued. As Auden and the thirties context demonstrates, such theoretical tensions have been variously articulated since the invention of aesthetics as a category for philosophical enquiry. On the relative successes and failures of art as an ethical enterprise, the thirties tell us that art’s pretensions to ethical relevance are most appreciably exposed when liberal democracy is met with pure ideological opposition in the form of totalitarian enemies. At such times, there is no meaningful precondition for the ‘infinitely sensitive’ or ‘mindful’ subject: one who is programmatically open to Otherness.

The paper traversed form, history and theory. Inspired by the paintings of the Flemish Master Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Auden’s ‘Musée’ condenses these issues in an especially germane way. The form of ekphrasis – defined in the modern sense as a verbal representation of a visual representation – presented Auden with a new set of co-ordinates with which to locate the quality of art’s ethical import. The transition between artistic forms and across historical epochs that ekphrasis undertakes is intrinsically universalist, Quipp claimed.

The paper read ‘Musée’ in tandem with Brueghel’s paintings, demonstrating how universal ethical truths can be transmitted between artworks; how particular instances of historical violence give these truths aesthetic shape; and finally, how the current controversy on Otherness might benefit from this universal ethical view.