Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2004. Vol. 4. Eger Journal of English Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 30)

ÉVA ANTAL The Rhetoric and Ethics of Reading

68 Éva Antal ethics of reading in his/my understanding. Since throughout he suggests keeping in mind that his "interest is not in ethics as such hut in the ethics cf reading and in the relation of the ethical moment in reading to relation in the sense of giving account, telling a story, narrating" (Miller EE, 15). But being a deconstructor, Miller cannot give a relaxing conclusion of his reading of the Kantian ethics. In the last pages he discusses the performative act of promising offered by the Kantian categorical imperative. Unfortunately, the example Kant gives is one of false promise, which "does not exemplify that of which it is meant to be an example" (Miller EE, 36). Miller with great pleasure displays Kant's blindness or slip of the tongue concluding that in the end the good reader is to be confronted by not the moral law, not even a good example of it, but by the unreadability of the text. The promise is made in language, and it cannot promise anything but itself with its own unfathomed abyss. To quote Miller's judgment: "The example, he (Kant) assures us, will serve as the safe bridge between (the universal law) and (the particular case). Instead of that, the example divides itself within itself between two possible but incompatible readings and so becomes unreadable. The bridge which was to vault over the abyss between universal and particular law opens another chasm within itself" (Miller ER, 35). Thinking of the bridge-metaphor, we can remember the vault of New Criticism and it can be concluded that both of them, the modernist and postmodernist metaphors of reading, remain in the realm of figurative falsehood'. Thus, in texts the ethical can be said to basically mean the introduction of a universal 'must'. As Miller summarises: In what I call 'the ethical moment' there is a claim made on the author writing the work, on the narrator telling the story within the fiction of the novel, on the characters within the story at their decisive moments of their lives, and on the reader, teacher, or critic responding to the work. This ethical 'I must' cannot... be accounted for by the social and historical forces that impinge upon it. In fact the ethical moment contests these forces or is subversive of them (Miller EE, 8). Now, we can ask the question: why is it so important for the de constructors to insist on the existence of such discursive modes, namely, the ethical, the social, the political or the historical, which sound quite odd in their rhetorical analyses? In his introduction, Miller says that his provocative choosing of the title and topic, 'ethics of reading' can be explained by the attacks on deconstruction, as it is often labelled as 'nihilistic', 'ahistorical', 'relativist', 'immoral' or 'negative' (Miller ER, 9). In spite of these mistaken, or at least awkward, polemics being aimed at calling against the rhetorical-