research interests: rhetoric & ethical life
I work on various fields or sites–the philosophy of technology, politics and identity, communication and culture, the medical humanities–but these are tied together through the rhetorical and ethical study of culture and text. I publish on the rhetoric and ethics of “life,” in the multiple ways in which this term is constituted. I am particularly concerned with the rhetorical and biopolitical dimensions of ethical subjectivity.
My work begins with Foucault’s late definition of ethics as “the self’s relation with itself.” I see this relation as a rhetorical and cultural act. Who am I? How do I understand myself? What are the terms through which I will understand myself? Who controls these terms? Is my identity tied to these terms, or am I free (and to what extent?) to forge new relations to myself and to others? What would it mean to accept the terms that are given to me?
The ethical self is not an autonomous subject who knows in any Cartesian sense. The rational, liberal humanist subject has been devastated not only by poststructuralist critiques, but moreover, is increasingly unseated by recent advances in science and technology (e.g., in post-genomic medicine, which displaces agency onto/into our genes). How–in what ways–might we develop an ethics that will be commensurate with emergent tecnhoscientific subjectivities? How might we understand ethics while respecting difference/s and heteronomy?
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