Où est le lieu de l'éthique ?

Ethics has been translated into institutional spaces that-and this is no coincidence or rather one must ask oneself if it is indeed a coincidence-are called “advisory cells,” “ethical spaces,” that one finds in specific establishments or as regional initiatives. Today, speaking in this way of ethical space, in an explicit and even technical fashion, refers not o much to the marginal informal space that exists at the sick person's bedside, indeed the reality under consideration. It refers to the formalization of this space into ethical committees. It corresponds to the spatial and institutional layout of an ethical ambition that, for its part, develops in time. But this situation is ambiguous, for what does that mean? Does the factual question - there are ethical spaces - marry the question of principle: in what sense are these spaces ethical? One might here expect a reply that would map out the different types of ethics governing the different committees. My aim is however not to provide a panorama of the ethical spaces but to question the relations that ethics maintains with the question of place and how one inhabits it. For it does not suffice to provide a place for ethics for it to take place. This amounts to asking oneself how to keep the ethical aspiration alive in this institutionalized form. Is this not what is now taking place in the relation that ethics upholds to the place where it finds its configuration?