Grief and the Collapse of “Distancing” in the Reader— Haiku and Ethics, a Brief Consideration
The [question] is what it means for our ethical obligations when we are up against another person or group, find ourselves invariably joined to those we never chose, and must respond to solicitations in languages we may not understand or even wish to understand. . . . [W]e might say that we do not merely or only receive information from the media. . . . We do not only consume, and we are not only paralyzed by the surfeit of images. Sometimes, not always, the images that are imposed upon us operate as an ethical solicitation . . . we are in such moments affronted by something that is beyond our will, not of our making, that comes to us from the outside, as an imposition but also as an ethical demand . . . these are ethical obligations that do not require our consent. ~Judith Butler[1]
A Poetics of Resistance
Philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler is concerned with grieving, in particular with possibilities for grieving for the distanced other.[2] Accordingly, it is a crime against an ethical humanity when the U.S. population no longer experiences any real feeling for the deaths of Iraqis and Afghanis, in these wars[3]—and this “non-feeling” is composed or composited through coercive and selective forms of censorship, such as the government’s disallowing photos to be taken of returning coffins and destroyed bodies—these images rarely appear on TV or in the press, if at all.[4]
I would submit that modern haiku, in one of its faces, is a poetics of resistance, offering a site of grieving. Through the use of broken language, imagistic and linguistic fragments, shards of a world presented via savage omission, and relativisms which linger absolutely, the haiku cuts into ordinary reality with a salient hammering: a temple bell resonant with after-images of endinglessness. . . .
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