Ethics and politics after post-structuralism: Levinas, Derrida, Nancy

Abstract

This book offers a distinctive theoretical approach to the problem of ethics and responsibility in the study of Politics and International Relations. The book asks what post-foundational accounts of ethics mean for practical politics: can we think about politics without an appeal to foundational ethics, and what might this politics look like? 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. The ‘ethical’, the book argues, 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; compelling and irreconcilable obligations can and do happen, in a forceful way, at the limits of foundations. As such the book proposes the need for sensitivity to the ways in which the existing order is already challenged and displaced from within through precisely the unsecured claims made in the name of ethics. 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.