The Grotesque: On Fleshing Out the Subject of Ethics

This essay asks what kind of ethics we would obtain if we conceptualize
the subject as a grotesque subject, constituted by a grotesque body. Cohen
Shabot argues that the grotesque subject, provided with a grotesque body,
constitutes a clearly material, concrete subject, which in turn emphasizes
elements such as hybridity, plurality, excess, waste, openness and a
constant connection between itself and the world, between itself and its
others. Cohen Shabot claims that if we accept Foucault’s idea that bodies
are created by power and that, at at the same time, they constitute a way to
resist and create new forms of power, we can relate to the grotesque
subject as lending itself to a new way of conceiving a resistant
subjectivity, opposed to classical and modernist ideas of subjectivity and
to the ethics which derives from either ideal