An Ethical Rupture: Brodsky’s Legacy and the Politics of Reading in a Time of Crisis

Abstract

In an era of sharpening polarization, critics need methods beyond “defense” versus “condemnation” when confronting works that fuse aesthetic power with ethical harm. Focusing on the Anglophone reception of Joseph Brodsky after the full-scale outbreak of the Russia–Ukraine war (2022), this article theorizes An Ethic of Agonistic Care. Synthesizing Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic politics and bell hooks’s ethics of love, the framework treats conflict as inescapable yet channels it toward reparative dialogue and responsibility. It is operationalized as a five-step protocol for ethical reading: positional examination, emotional diagnosis, agonistic engagement, reparative re-reading, and critical re-contextualization. Close readings of Brodsky (poetry, essays) and comparative cases from post-socialist and contemporary geopolitical literatures demonstrate the approach’s transferability and limits, showing how it avoids both facile decanonization and aesthetic exceptionalism. The article argues that An Ethic of Agonistic Care supplies a rigorous, practicable method for addressing controversial cultural legacies and re-anchors “respect” and “love” as scholarly virtues in post–Cold War cross-cultural understanding, offering a pedagogical pathway for critical civic education.