Thomas Hettche's Wound Ethics

This essay analyzes the work of Thomas Hettche as the combination of an attention to corporeality with an attempt at developing an alternative ethics. Like several other writers in the context of the turn to the body in recent German writing, Hettche probes medical metaphors, especially dissection, prosthetics, and incubation. For him, however, the body is not only “Schnittfläche,” a cut—and cutting—surface, but a “Schnittstelle,” an interface where differences can be thought together. Hettche's work, reminiscent of poststructuralism's ethical turn, attempts to construct an intrinsic ethics without an a priori transcendental, nor psychoanalytical basis for its injunctions. This ethics hinges upon wounds—as does this essay, formally and thematically obsessed with multiple cuts: wounds conducive to corporeal sympathy instead of psychological empathy; wounds as a site of the radical openness of the same to the other; wounds as the cuts between pain and its textual representation.