Synopses & Reviews
This groundbreaking book offers a fresh and innovative perspective on ethics and politics after poststructuralism. Madeleine Fagan argues that the "ethical" should not be understood as a label; it does not mean "good" or "right", and is not an evaluation or guide. Rather, both the ethical and the political are descriptions of the context in which we find ourselves. Fagan offers an account of the inseparability of ethics and politics that challenges existing accounts of poststructuralist ethics and shows the need for a practice-based rethinking of the ethico-political. Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, Ethics and Politics after Poststructuralism puts forward a radical and far-reaching critique of both foundational and non-foundational ethical theory.
Synopsis
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 that politics isn't built on ethics, where the two are separate things: politics and ethics are actually inseparable. 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. Fagan shows us how it has become necessary to rethink the relationship between ethics and politics, based on how we practice both. In doing so, she overturns a series of common assumptions about about poststructuralist ethics.
About the Author
Madeleine Fagan is Institute of Advanced Studies Global Research Fellow, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick at the University of Warwick.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Politics of Ethical Theory
1. Ethics, Politics, Limits
2. Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics as Relation
3. Jacques Derrida: The Im-possibility of Responsibility
4. Jean-Luc Nancy: The Transimmanence of Ethics
5. The Limits of Theory: Ethics, Politics, Practice
6. Conclusion: Ethics and Politics after Poststructuralism
Bibliography