Ethics of care challenge both the boundaries between the public and private spheres and the limits of moral philosophy through an understanding of human beings as embodied and relational. Studying care offers opportunities to better understand how care and caring motivate action—perhaps as strongly as ambition, duty, obligation, or a sense of responsibility—and lead to outcomes that affect relationships and communities. It also fosters interest in improving the conditions and structures within which caring occurs in order to envision a more harmonious treatment of societal needs. Such practices recognize and embrace the inter-connectedness of humanity—even in its relationships with non-humans—and the values of empathy, compassion, and coexistence. Yet theoreticians of care remind us not to ignore the power dynamics involved, especially given recent discussions of vulnerability and unreciprocity, whether between care-givers and care-receivers, or among humans engaging with the demands and needs of their respective environments.
Although primarily developed in the Anglophone world within feminist circles, ethics of care have been developed in multiple directions by theoreticians and philosophers such as Annette Baier, Daniel Engster, Virginia Held, Eva Feder Kittay, Sara Ruddick, Michael Slote, and Joan Tronto, whose perspectives are informed by their areas of expertise and their varying commitment to political activism and feminism, as well as their critical stance on neoliberalism. In France, as in the UK, the Netherlands and Germany, the reception of care ethics dates back to the late nineties and has led to the emergence of a new field––l’éthique de la sollicitude, l’éthique du care––which is being explored by thinkers like Sandra Laugier, Patricia Paperman, Fabienne Brugère, Elsa Dorlin, Paulette Guinchard and Jean-François Petit. This session will allow us to explore the commonalities, intersections, and incompatibilities between ethics of care and alternative modes of thinking the ethics and politics of care in the wake of Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Lévinas, Monique Wittig, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Michel de Certeau, Hans Jonas, Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and others.
The insistence of theorists of care like Carol Gilligan on voice and the ability to narrate one’s experiences sparks many questions: can relations of care take place outside of language? How do space and movement factor into care giving? These are some of the considerations that Catherine Witt broaches in her work on the alternative commune or réseau de prise en charge set up in the Cévennes in 1968 by writer, educator, and filmmaker Fernand Deligny. This experimental space of care, which over the course of a couple decades brought together severely autistic children between the ages of five and ten and non-professional care-givers, is documented in a series of essays, films, and maps produced by Deligny and his collaborators, who document the playing out of caring relations in this para-institutional reinvention of common space.
Audrey Evrard observes how social invisibility and precarity have been central concerns in the French social documentary production of the last thirty years. Less invested in dogmatic ideological battles than past militant filmmakers, French documentarians have instead directly questioned and attempted to overcome the ethical collapse of the documentary practice in the face of precariousness. In recent years, French philosophy, in the works of Guillaume Le Blanc and Corinne Peluchon in particular, has become more porous to the perspectives developed in Anglo-American scholarship about the ethic of precariousness (Butler) and care (Gilligan, Tronto). Her paper redefines French documentary’s incursion in the social sphere as an ethical praxis of care, relationality and affective solidarity between precarious and vulnerable subjects, filmmakers and viewers, especially through excerpts from three films—Fragments sur la misère (1998), Ils ne mourraient pas tous mais tous étaient frappés (2005) and On a grévé (2014).
Annabel Kim argues how the 20th-century French canon has effected a purge of the excrement that abounds in it, as if the democratization of the private toilet flushed literature of its fecal matter as well. In particular, she examines Romain Gary’s La vie devant soi and Marguerite Duras’s La douleur, both haunted by the Holocaust, for the way each foregrounds fecal matter as the site from which to articulate an ethics of care. In both texts, the narrator is compelled to respond to the vulnerable fecality of the other by wiping and cleaning this excrement that is not theirs. Differences of age, sex, race, religion, and ability are transcended in the face of an excrementality that calls for the boundary between self and other to be elided in an adoption of the other’s fecality as one’s own.
Grace An describes an ethics of care in the art and activism of Delphine Seyrig, who saw herself as an “advocate” for both every character she played and all the women who felt represented through them, in parallel with her involvement with the Mouvement de libération de femmes in 1970s France. Acting required an embodied relation to others, and such embodiment was intrinsically linked to empathy and action. Seyrig’s negotiation of the utopian, artistic, pragmatic, ethical, and political spheres of life in the 1960s and 1970s provides a rich case study for the search for an ethics of care avant la lettre.
A panel of four is crowded, but we are committed to the synergetic exchange of ideas and to keeping a minimum of fifteen minutes available for discussion.