Jo Faulkner - April 3

Security from Moral Ambiguity: the ‘gray zone’ and the child witness in catastrophe literature

Abstract:
In recent decades the figure of the child witness has become prevalent in catastrophe literature. The child’s putative innocence renders it an attractive site of identification for readers anxious about their own complicity in moral disaster. But the child’s ability to epitomize suffering also informs a particular theoretical deployment of “infancy,” as an incapacity of expression that has come to mark contemporary understandings of witnessing and our ethical responsiveness to catastrophe. With reference to Agamben, Levi, and trauma theory, this paper begins to interrogate the possibility of a responsibility grounded in moral ambiguity and apprehension of one’s own “infancy.”

Biography:
Joanne Faulkner is an ARC DECRA Fellow in Philosophy, the School of Humanities, UNSW. She is the author of The Importance of Being Innocent (Cambridge UP, 2011) and Dead Letters to Nietzsche, or the Necromantic Art of Reading Philosophy (Ohio UP, 2010), co-author of Understanding Psychoanalysis, and has published articles in Angelaki, Theory and Event, Hypatia, and Critical Horizons, among other journals. Her specific research area at present is the political ontology of childhood.

Seminar audio file (MP3, 17272.13 KB)