Document Type : Research Paper

Author

• Amrita Banerjee

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

Abstract

Care ethics emphasizes the incessant nature of the work of care. The other-oriented focus of care work and the asymmetric relation between the one-caring and the cared-for entails a normative commitment to a cyclical conception of living time on the part of the one-caring. Moreover, in care, we must think of the time of the self as intertwined with the time of the other, thus constituting a mutual temporality. However, from the perspective of a feminist phenomenology of time, potential moral harms can be identified in the temporal structure of care, which may cause caring time to degenerate into uncaring time for the one-caring. To avoid such a predicament, it is imperative to develop an emancipatory ethics of time at the heart of the relational ontology of care. I argue that when various modalities of living time in care sediment into a coherentist ontology of time, only then is there a degradation into uncaring time. To positively reconstruct a radical notion of caring time, we must build a disruptive ontology within our conception of caring time, which highlights the significance of rupture, dissonance, disruption, and distortion within the everydayness of care. The argument in the paper serves a normative purpose since it draws our attention to what we owe morally to the one-caring in terms of their time. My analysis weaves together care ethics, feminist phenomenology and feminist writing from India through a philosophical engagement with Amar Jiban by Rassundari Devi.

Keywords

• Care Ethics
• Feminist phenomenology of time
• Feminist philosophy in India
• Rassundari Devi
• uncaring time
• emancipatory ethics of time
• disruptive ontology of time

Main Subjects

• philosophy