The Ethics of Dialogue: Bakhtin and Levinas

he reemergence of subjective agency as a crucial category in recent literary and cultural studies can be seen as a direct response to the decentering of the subject enacted by the first wave of poststructuralism. Poststructuralists of all stripes are increasingly being pressed to engage the question of ethical agency after the subject (see, e.g., Nancy). At the same time, however, a certain critique of the humanist or Enlightenment subject remains firmly in place. While there is a great deal of sympathy for rethinking notions of subjectivity in the current theoretical field, no one wants anything to do with the appropriating instrumental rationality of the bourgeois subject. In fact, virtually all critical camps-groups as diverse as Habermasians, feminists, postcolonial theorists, Marxists, Deleuzians, African Americanists, deconstructors, Lacanians, queer theorists, and pragmatists-remain aligned in their attempts to critique a subjectivity that inexorably goes about reducing the other to the categories of the self. Any ethical system that understands the other as simply like the self' will be unable to respond adequately to the other's uniqueness and singularity; indeed, such a reduction amounts to a kind of subjective colonialism, where all the other's desires are reduced to the desires of the home country, the self.