Abstract

This chapter turns to the figure of the whistleblower in order to illustrate how certain features of Levinasian normativity might find practical application. The chapter traces the origin of whistleblowing to the conflicting loyalties the whistleblower faces—to an organisation that must be given the opportunity to correct its wrongdoing; or to a society which will be harmed by such wrongdoing and has no way to discover such wrongdoing. The chapter follows Andrade who argues that the whistleblower should be understood as the ethical, and flexible boundary of the organisation, which requires that who qualifies as a recipient of a disclosure of wrongdoing remain flexible (2015). It is then shown how the flexibility of organisational boundaries illustrate the provisionality of Levinasian normativity. On this reading, the whistleblower is better understood as the ethico-politico boundary of the organisation. The retaliation that the whistleblower suffers as a result of their disclosure also demonstrates that, like the (im)possible sacrifice of the provisional saint and hero, the whistleblower’s sacrifice also amounts to an (im)possible sacrifice. I then turn to a reading of Alford’s (2007) paper on whistleblower narratives to argue that ‘choice-less choice’ and ‘narratives stuck in static time’ illustrate a whistleblowing subjectivity that already reveals an affirmation of a supererogatory attitude. The autonomy of undecidability, I argue, makes better sense of whistleblowing autonomy understood as choiceless choice, while the recursive oscillation of Levinasian normativity offers a way to escape the prison of static time.