The ethos of history

The fundamental character of historicity does not depend on the fact that the human being has a history; rather, all history depends on the originary temporality and historicity of the human being. Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Geschichtlichkeit"1 One way to approach the relation between history and ethics would be to see ethics as a response to the past andits influence on the "reality" around us, a response to a world where actions and events rarely, if at all, seem to be motivated by ethical conduct and are driven, instead, by economic, social, and political forces. There is plenty of evidence that this is indeed the case, as the current interest and need to reassess the question of ethics and history seemsto be motivated by two primary historical factors: on the one hand, the atrocities and catastrophes of our century the two world wars, the Holocaust, the war in Bosnia, the famine in Ethiopia, the genocide in Rwanda, and so on—and, on the other, the unprecedented interrogation of the cultural and political meaning of differences in race, gender, ethnicity, orclass. In many of those cases, ethics intersects and meshes with politics, looking to history for various lessons that would prevent the recurrence of the unethical, say in politics, the economy, or gender relations, and perhaps allow for adifferent, more "ethical," future. To the extent that history is seen in these debates as discursively mediated, as a product of representational construction, language and representation play prominent, if not decisive, roles in thinking the relation between ethics and history. In such approaches, though, ethics is a priori cast into a form of response to aworld that is given albeit historically and culturally, thus, also as transient and discursively formed produced as a result of other, non-ethical forces. In this context, ethics's role comes to be defined in terms of providing guidelines for how to intervene into such an parameters o f how humans inhabit the world. In its modern articulations, ethics functions as morality and refers to a set, or often competing sets, of rules and norms that regulate behavior in terms of prescribed and prohibited practices. More recently, in the wake of Levinas's philosophy and poststructuralist critiques, ethics has become primarily a matter of responsibility to "the other" or of an acknowledgment of difference, which exceeds and calls into question the idea of a rule-governed morality: the other's irreducible difference" bends " the rules, soto speak, as it disquiets the idea of the other, which lies at the origin of moral norms. The asymmetry in the relation to the radical other produces a certain curvature of the social space, a disequilibrium that keeps calling into questionthe symmetrical and reciprocal articulations o f obligations and rights. A Levinasi an answer to the question about the relation of ethics and history, at least on the basis o f his early writings, and Totality and Infinity inparticular, would be to say that the ethical call remains an-archic, literally, "without origin," coming as though from beyond history and the world.