Political movements fail without unachievable one-on-one ethical encounters

Evidence

This encounter can only happen when the respondents inhabit something like normality. Most political movements fail in the long run because of the absence of this engagement. In fact, it is impossible for all leaders (subaltern or otherwise) to engage every subaltern in this way, especially across the gender divide. This is why ethics is the experience of the impossible. Please note that I am not saying that ethics are impossible, but rather that ethics is the experience of the impossible. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2178

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘ethical singularity’/‘secret encounter’ as the one-on-one response-exchange distinct from solidarity with the oppressed in crisis.
• XREF: The claim that ethical relation is ‘the experience of the impossible’ gestures directly at Derrida’s aporia of responsibility — tracing the deconstructive lineage behind Spivak’s strategic essentialism. — connects to: Political agency cannot be grasped apart from ethical agency — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival…, 253; Individual moral agency resists being dissolved into larger social movements
• DEEPTHINKING: The idea that collective politics fails without an engagement that is definitionally impossible for everyone to have — yet is still the only ground of ethics — is a genuinely dense, live paradox worth weeks of thought.

Broader Connections

• Political agency cannot be grasped apart from ethical agency #expands (0.85) — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 253
• Individual moral agency resists being dissolved into larger social movements #expands (0.82)