Constellations, Mediation and Mimesis: Relationality in Ethical life

How can relationality help us understand ethical life? In this paper I argue that traditional forms of moral philosophy predicated on the individual not only disavow relationality but induce indifference towards others. Instead of offering normative justifications or foundations for individual action, I consider the relationality within ethical life. I maintain that ethical life is a contingent possibility mediated by particular constellations of concepts, discourses and material structures. As such I argue that ethical life is not instituted on abstract principles but through mimetically constituted relations with our human and non-human others. I explain that mimesis is both a relational way of doing justice to things in their particularity and an ongoing affirmation of our relations with others. Understanding ethical life means to go beyond theories of
4
recognition, to see that mimesis extends outside human relations to our relationship with the material world. Subsequently I argue that mimesis displaces the individual by bringing persons and the worlds we inhabit into an ethical relation.