Irony, Embodiment, and the 'critical Attitude': Engaging Saba Mahmood's Critique of Secular Morality
Title:
Irony, Embodiment, and the 'critical Attitude': Engaging Saba Mahmood's Critique of Secular Morality
Author:
Waggoner, Matt
Appeared in:
Culture and religion
Paging:
Volume 6 (2005) nr. 2 pages 237-261
Year:
2005-07
Contents:
At the intersection of feminism, postcolonial studies, and religious studies, this essay engages Saba Mahmood's critique of universalistic ethics and post-structural feminism. It contrasts Mahmood's 'ethical embodiment' with a concept of 'ethical irony', offering examples of the latter from literature (Brecht, Baudelaire) and cultural theory (Carolyn Steedman, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault). Its thesis is that ethical irony signifies modes of critical engagement that are not premised on notions of metaphysical subjectivity or abstract rules, but may nonetheless be cross-culturally translatable. One specific formulation of ethical irony considered concerns the figure of injurable bodies. At once material (bodily) and transcendental (unknown injuries from unknown sources, or the possibility of injury), injurable bodies the irreducibility of ethics to the purely abstract and the purely empirical. Finally, the defence of ethical irony speaks to the viability of upholding what Foucault called the 'critical attitude' as a cross-cultural norm.
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