| Understanding literature in an active context, this essay approaches political writings by Jacques Ranciere through the process of close reading provided by Carol Jacobs such that the ramifications for the category of the ethical can be examined in Ranciere's work. Moments of connection can be found between the categories of the political Ranciere provides and the importance of those categories in the close reading Jacobs applies to the writings of W. G. Sebald. An ethical orientation that is made visible through Jacobs's reading of Sebald's novel does not contain within it a specific moral identity. It allows for possibilities of identity that may include judgment with an ethical intent, and therefore provide the ethical a visibility, but does not provide a fixed ethical ideology. Jacobs's understanding of the ethical opens the space for a critique of Ranciere's vision of politics as he describes the possibilities of an improvement on democracy, the aesthetic staging of politics. The improvements on democracy Ranciere suggests are made on the basis of a possibility for ethical critique within the theater of democracy. This possibility for critique, the openness of the ethical, is where Ranciere's methodology and that of Jacobs coincide even as disagreement occurs between them. |
