Towards an Ethics of Distance: Representation, Free Production and Virtuality

McCaffrey, E. ORCID: 0000-0002-8336-9860, 2016. Towards an Ethics of Distance: Representation, Free Production and Virtuality. Australian Journal of French Studies, 53 (1-2), pp. 23-38. ISSN 0004-9468

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Abstract

This article takes it inspiration from a crisis between Deleuzian free production and representation in contemporary virtual and digital culture. The aim is to sketch a different ethics to the ethics of difference between free production and representation as described by Deleuze and Guattari and invoked by Michel Foucault in his preface to Anti-Oedipe. This article outlines the case for an ethical relationality between these two structures which reflects the socio-political and ethical exigencies of our virtual and digital cultures: specifically, an ethics of relationality derived paradoxically from the distance inscribed in ethical philosophy. Drawing on an amalgamation of Ricoeurean ethics and social constructionism in a definition of selfhood, I argue for the need to stand back from the distanciating effects of the virtual revolution – not with a view to approximating the cultural politics of specificity in the logic of representation – but to see in the gap in "distance from" specificity, a space of ethical and philosophical agency wherein lies the value-added of otherness.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Australian Journal of French Studies
Creators:	McCaffrey, E.
Publisher:	Liverpool University Press
Date:	2016
Volume:	53
Number:	1-2
ISSN:	0004-9468
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.3828/ajfs.2016.03 DOI
Divisions:	Schools > School of Arts and Humanities
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	22 Feb 2016 11:52
Last Modified:	09 Jun 2017 13:59
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/27005

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