In poststructuralist thought, ethics registers an openness that until the moment of response remains unmarked or unspecified. This poststructuralist ethics speaks to an idealized ethics of loyalty, defined as identification with a particular other-as-self (nation, ethnicity, religion, politics, sexuality,etc.). A larger discourse on ethics thus reveals the presence of a metaphorics of space and time: the temporality of a call and response; the spatial "facing" outward to an unknown other or inward to the communion of the group; the spatial borders defining self/other oppositions and identifications; the historical disjunctions that constitute the time of the other differently from the time of the self; the fixing and differentiating of identities in space and time.

This seminar seeks to explore the tension or division between the spatial and temporal metaphorics that organize these two ethical modes as they unfold in the intertwining relations of political philosophy, theory, literature, autobiography, psychoanalysis, cultural politics.

Please send abstracts or direct questions to: Yung-Hsing Wu, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Louisiana, Box 44691, Griffin Hall 221, Lafayette, LA 70506; yhwu@worldnet.att.net