Boothroyd, David (2011) Off the record: Levinas, Derrida and the secret of responsibility. Theory, Culture and Society, 28 (7-8). pp. 41-59. ISSN 0263-2764. (doi:10.1177/0263276411423037) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:31687)
The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided. | |
Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263276411423037 |
Abstract
This article aims to demonstrate how the formation of ethical subjectivity must be considered in conjunction with the techno-politics of secrecy and disclosure, and it proposes an account of the ways in which the technical transition and 'democratization' of archival upload/download capacity associated with digital communications fundamentally challenges the existing structure of control over such things as censorship and cultural memory understood in terms of power of recall. It argues that it is against this background and in view of the mediality of communications that the question of responsibility with respect to secrets and their disclosure must ultimately be posed. It seeks to establish the difference between a purely political and an ethico-political understanding of the secrecy/disclosure dyad as this functions, on the one hand, in relation to philosophical inquiry itself and, on the other, in relation to normative representations of informational events, and it contextualizes its theoretical account of this difference in relation to the 'Wikileaks phenomenon' viewed as a disclosive event. It examines how ethical subjectivity is formed in relation to 'information' and in the wider context of a digital culture of archivization, characterized by the ubiquitous recording of communications of all kinds. Drawing centrally on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom 'infinite responsibility' is 'incarnated' as the 'ultimate secret of subjectivity' in me, and Derrida's account of both the necessary technicity of the human and the impossibility of 'saying the event', it proposes a way of thinking the ethico-techno-politics of secrecy and disclosure in terms of the singularity of the event and the unique responsibility of the ethical Subject in relation to that.
Item Type: | Article |
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DOI/Identification number: | 10.1177/0263276411423037 |
Uncontrolled keywords: | deconstruction, Derrida, ethics, event, Levinas, subjectivity, technoculture |
Subjects: | H Social Sciences |
Divisions: | Divisions > Division for the Study of Law, Society and Social Justice > School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research |
Depositing User: | Andrew Buller |
Date Deposited: | 15 Oct 2012 13:31 UTC |
Last Modified: | 16 Nov 2021 10:09 UTC |
Resource URI: | https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/31687 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes) |
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