ENG328Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 37: Judith Butler, Felix Culpa, Jean-Paul Sartre
The Bell (Cont.)
Untested goodness is better than tested sin
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James is not interested in consequences or ends or ethical self-fashioning,
he's simply interested in the rules
Thoroughly anti-Christian
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Approach is anti-consequentialist
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Absolutist ethics
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No felix culpa - fortunate/happy fall
Fall of Adam and Eve
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Allows us to create our moral selves
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Gives knowledge of good and evil
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Phenomenology of agency is missing for him
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Complexity of ethics bypassed by James
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"I cannot agree with Milton… virtue, innocence should be valued
whatever its history…how false it is to tell our young people to value
experience…"
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Pg. 153 - giving Michael an invigorating sense of possibility
Toby looking up to him
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Gaze of the other doesn’t have to be reductive and destructive
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It can be liberating
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But Michael doesn't feel like he has to confront himself
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Sartre - empty flight of the transcendence - feeling like you can deny certain
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Toby finding out about Michael's homosexuality is his fortunate fall
He looks to himself to find unconscious impulses
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Male panic in the face of sexuality
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Found himself looking at Michael curiously protective
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Deepening Toby's feeling
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Michael hasn't dealt with his feelings towards Nick at all
Fear that Nick might have seen
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Did not want Nick to think he preferred a younger man
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Didn't want Nick to think him unfaithful
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Clearly hasn't severed himself from the relationship
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Not even thinking about the damage inflicted on Toby
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Sexuality as a kind of performativity rather than an essence - Judith Butler
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High modernist novels didn't have passages like this that had discussion of
characters' ideas
Monological discourse that reflects Murdoch's view of sexuality
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Dora talking about the effect of the picture of her
Using philosophical terms, solipsism
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No conjunction about authorial intervention
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No feeling of appealing to memetic voice
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Michael inclines to this abstract language, so less of a problem with him
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Difficult to maintain
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Dora is capable of moral and spiritual growth in a way that other
characters are not
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Noel Spens represents the atheistic perspective
Resolutely secular perspective
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No need for transcendence
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Not even Dora's aesthetic transcendence
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Sartre would argue that there is much more facticity and necessity in our lives
that we think
Michael incapable of embracing facticity
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Thinks all desire can be transcendent
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His sermon is an exercise in self-deception
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But doesn’t negate the validity of some of the ideas he presents
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Feels he has totally destroyed Toby's peace of mind
Totally misreading him
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Portrayed as somewhat enriched by the moral complexity
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Possible to be both a sexual opportunist and spiritual leader
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Goodness is meaningless without choice•
Michael's interpretation of the bell is different from James
To and fro of subjectivity
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We must work from inside outwards
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James thinks it is the incarnation of the virtues of Catholic folly
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Lecture 37
Monday, March 6, 2017
2:11 PM
