Stevens, R: Burning For the Other

Although the "turn to ethics" is now a standard armature of postmodernism, it has had little support in the realm of art theory. As a result the art world hasn‘t fully engaged the ethical challenge the Burning Man project presents, to make art that calls us to do, to perform responsibility itself. Emmanuel Levinas‘ philosophy, a mainspring of this ethical turn, also has been seen as offering scant help to aesthetics. This book casts Levinas‘ most uncompromising work, Otherwise than Being, into interplay with the semiotics of Charles Peirce within the context of Burning Man‘s artistic ferment. Their "collaboration" reveals both artworks and signs to be ways a human comes to selfhood in the act of expressing the impact of the Other‘s otherness, an act of Saying in which the subject‘s self-allegiance burns away. It also brings to Peirce‘s notion of the human-being-as-sign the ethical dimension he sought. Finally it validates Burning Man‘s gift ethos and art making, through the sacrificial responsibility for which participants, and all humans-as-signs, burn. Those interested in the making of artful ethics and ethical art will value this thought-provoking philosophical synthesis.