Ethics and Politics after Poststructuralism: Levinas, Derrida and Nancy

✍ Scribed by Madeleine Fagan

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 209
• Series: Taking on the Political
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

What would political thought look like without the foundation of ethics? Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, Madeleine Fagan puts forward a radical and far-reaching refusal of foundational ethics. Instead, she proposes an account of the inseparability of ethics and politics. The 'ethical' should not be understood as a label; it does not mean 'good' or 'right', it is not an evaluation or guide. Rather, both the ethical and the political are descriptions of the context in which we find ourselves. The book highlights the necessity of a practice-based rethinking of the relationship between ethics and politics and so denaturalises a series of commonplaces about poststructuralist ethics.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction – The Politics of Ethical Theory
The Limits of Ethical Theory
Non-foundational Ethics and Practical Politics
The Limits of Ethics and Politics
Map of the Book
Chapter 1Ethics, Politics, Limits
Introduction: Tracing the Limits of Theories
The Promise and Limitations of Post-foundational Ethics
Relational ethics
Relativism, inconsistency or blandness: a triple bind
Poststructuralism and progressive politics
The Move from Ethics to Politics
The politics of alterity
The ethical relation
The move from ethics to politics: duty in decision
The politics of alterity: democracy
The politics of ethical difference
The ethical relation
The move from ethics to politics: a Levinasian supplement
The politics of ethical difference: democracy
Refiguring the Limit between Ethics and Politics
Refusing ethics
The separation of ethics and politics
Working at the limits of theories
Chapter 2Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics as Relation
Introduction: Ethics, Politics and the Third Person
The Other
Ontology, knowledge and totalisation
Alterity and relational subjectivity
The face
Responsibility
The Third Person
The immediacy of the Third
The impossibility of responsibility
Problematising ethics and politics: justice, charity and the state
Relationality as Plurality
Chapter 3Jacques Derrida: The Im-possibility of Responsibility
Introduction: Theory, Im-possibility, Limits
The Responsible Decision
The limits of knowledge
The limits of the subject
The Ethics of Deconstruction?
Response, the Other and absolute duty
The unconditional
Undecidability
The Politics of Deconstruction?
Deducing politics from ethics
Political in(ter)ventions
Im-possibility and the trace
Chapter 4Jean-Luc Nancy: The Transimmanence ofEthics
Introduction: Starting at the Limit
The Singular-Plural of Being
The ‘with’ and the hyphen
Sharing, exposure and the in-common
Politics without Essence
Totalisation and the resistance of community
The politics of transimmanence
Ethics without Transcendence
The ethical and the ontological
The invention of justice
Ontology, ethos, limits
Chapter 5The Limits of Theory: Ethics, Politics,Practice
Introduction: Displacing the Line between Ethics and Politics
Grounds, Origins and Foundations
Looking for a more responsible politics
The relation of ethics and politics
Immanence and Transcendence
Transimmanence and the limits of grounds
Alterity without transcendence
Conduct as Origin: ‘Practical’ Politics
Conclusion:Ethics and Politics after Poststructuralism
Notes
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Bibliography
Index