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An Ethics Founded on Textuality: J. Hillis Miller’s Ethical Criticism

Many would agree that moral philosophy’s greatest traditions are still Aristotle’s deontological and Kant’s teleological ethics. Contemporary American literary studies interpret these two traditions in distinctly different ways. Whereas the ‘neo-humanists’ (most prominently Wayne C. Booth and Martha C. Nussbaum) ground their theory and criticism on Aristotle’s moral philosophy, the leading deconstructive critic, J. Hillis Miller turns to the Kantian tradition as the theoretical foundation of his own kind of ethical criticism. Miller’s purpose is nothing less ambitious, nothing less original, nothing less deconstructive-to-the-core (and perhaps nothing less questionable) than to ‘found an ethics upon textual principles’.2 In order to achieve this goal Miller has to be able to show and prove that the analogy between a person (whom, in Kantian ethics, one has to respect as an example of the law) and a text is valid. What is of utmost importance is to see that in order to be able to understand and evaluate Miller’s ethical criticism one always has to be aware of the fact that (in Miller’s case) ethical theory and ethics in its broadest sense, on the one hand, and textuality and language