Difference and the Other: Considerations on Ethics and Politics in the Context of the Arts

This chapter proposes an interpretation of ethics and politics based on an intersection of the notions of difference and otherness.
Assuming that the subject is always constituted intersubjectively – that is, through the other –, authors such as Sartre and Levinas established a necessary relationship between subjectivity, responsibility, and ethics. On the other hand, the subject is also, by definition, a performative agent, an actor, and this phenomenological dimension tends to emancipate the subject from the seriousness of the real, as well as from the wide (ethical) contracts of social reality. This leads to tension between two distinct ways of articulating subjectivity and ethics: on the one hand, the perspective that ethics emerges along with subjectivity; on the other, the perspective that the subject can emancipate himself from ethics (or even precede it), even if he still depends, for his own constitution, on a subjective otherness, of an intersubjectivity.
This does not mean that there cannot be realism within the scope of a subjectivity that has escaped ethics. In the context of the arts, the ethical and aesthetic dimensions, although essentially distinct, both feed off the same interplay between subjectivity and realism, even though the realistic character of aesthetic authenticity (which lives on singularities) is very different from the realistic character of ethics (which moves towards consensus and universality).
The aesthetic experience expressed in art makes use of difference and dissent (understood here in the sense proposed by Jacques Rancière), but this political dimension should not be confused with the ethical dimension that governs art lobbies.