“The Things You Don't Choose”: Ethics, Singularity, and Gone Baby Gone (2007)

• Published in: Discourse (Berkeley, Calif.) Vol. 39; no. 1; pp. 117 - 139
• Main Author: Krzych, Scott
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Detroit Wayne State University Press 01.01.2017
• Subjects: Adaptations; Aftermath; Creativity; Critchley, Simon; Discourse ethics; Dolls; Drama; Ethical behavior; Ethical codes; Ethics; Exegesis & hermeneutics; Film adaptations; Film studies; Film Study; Heroism & heroes; Heteronormativity; Infants; Judgment; Justification; Lacan, Jacques Marie Emile (1901-1981); Lacanian other; Literary characters; Literary devices; Literary Genres; Logic; Moral Issues; Moral judgment; Morality; Mothers; Motion picture criticism; Motion pictures; Narrative techniques; Narratives; Perseveration; Plot (Narrative); Police; Political ethics; Psychiatry; Psychoanalysis; Repetition; Scientific ethics; Seminars; Social ethics; Social meaning; Subjectivity; Suicide; New York; United States > US
• ISSN: 1522-5321; 1536-1810
• DOI: 10.13110/discourse.39.1.0117

What remains (to be done) for a subject in the aftermath of an ethical act? This essay argues for a psychoanalytic conception of ethics that refuses to distinguish the act from its aftermath-that is, an ethics understood as a process of perseverance, of ongoing acts of judgment that refer to the past, are made in the present, and are wagered without concern for justification in the future. According to some influential elaborations of ethical theory in film studies, an ethical subject acts beyond, and very likely against, hegemonic norms of social or cultural meaning. Such accounts of ethical theory typically valorize cinematic examples of subjective destitution, associating the ethical with acts of suicide, either literal or figurative. I emphasize instead the creative aspects of ethical repetition that emerge from a subject's attempt to instantiate new modes of meaning making to replace the symbolic networks that have otherwise been dismantled or destroyed.