Political Responsibility: Responding to Predicaments of Power

IN SPITE of the prevalence of ethical tropes in theoretical discussions in North Atlantic scholarly circles, an explicit embrace of the ethical turn in the humanities and social sciences has not been as prominent as that afforded to other so-called turns—including the cultural, linguistic, theological, psychoanalytic, and affective turns—of the past thirty years. Indeed, in contrast with previous turns, the ethical turn displays an almost apologetic reluctance about its self-identity: uneasiness and ambiguity define the attitude of many theoretical proponents of the turn, even if its political practitioners—humanitarians and human and animal rights advocates, among others—are seldom troubled by its righteousness.¹ Proponents of the ethical turn, to be sure, do not move on a par, let alone converge on the content of ethics, ethical politics, and the domains susceptible to moralizing critique; nor are all practitioners of ethical politics equally depoliticized or of similar intellectual caliber.² But the different accents of alternative formulations constitute variations of a common theme: the aspiration to find normative principles, however pristine or murky, outside the political realm and its imperatives and deduce a supervenient ethical politics.

Critics have relentlessly denounced this turn’s theoretical conceits, political feints, and lack of critical import. Alain Badiou’s critique of “‘ethical’ ideology,” for instance, sums up the more salient aspects of the turn to ethics, or what could be cast as its symptoms, in terms of what he calls “its socialized variants: the doctrine of human rights, the victimary conception of man, humanitarian interference, bio-ethics…the ethics of differences, cultural relativism, moral exoticism, and so on.”³ Yet he curiously winds up with his own ethical politics of militancy, his “ethics of truth.” Something similar is at work in Ella Myers’s Worldly Ethics. While arguing that the turn to ethics “is less of a common purpose than a struggle over signification,” Myers offers sharp criticisms of several of its instantiations in the North Atlantic world.⁴ And yet, like Badiou, she forges her alternative within the parameters of an ethical politics. It is as if the grip of ethics, its englobant of politics, is such that even an alternative discourse has to be cast as an ethics, albeit of a different kind. What these otherwise acute treatments eschew is a consideration of the historical and political conditions for the turn they decry and the need to formulate ethical considerations beyond the framework of ethics, what Bertolt Brecht once referred to as an ethic whose goal is not Ethics or a political ethic outside Ethics, to echo Raymond Geuss’s apt formulation.⁵

Invoking Geuss is apposite here, as he has relentlessly criticized “the artificially illuminated circle of ‘Ethics’” that extends to current invocations of “normativity,” which not only cut across the analytical/continental divide but also figure prominently in hegemonic versions of critical theory (i.e., Habermas & Co.).⁶ Today, notions such as “normativity” or the “normative” serve as a sort of analytical sandbox: a placeholder in which the thick web of collective and individual lives, goals, practices, and goods, in their mediations and intersections as part of a historically constituted and politically sanctioned order, is not merely consigned, but actually subsumed, structured, and slanted, if not downright hypostatized, in ways such that a more politically robust elucidation and critique of these practices is severely impaired.⁷ And yet, for all the contemporary pervasiveness of this notion, the idea of “normativity” as a “single dominant” category is, in and of itself, an upshot of the larger turn to ethics of the last thirty years.⁸ A historicity seemingly unbeknownst to many practitioners who cleverly invoke “normative” principles to adjudicate competing perspectives or “normative deficits” to debar positions, which are then cast as good or bad—an intellectual regression and blind spot in critical theory if there was ever one. In fact, ideas of “normative foundations” have come perilously close to replacing social theory, as such, or any concrete historical analysis that ultimately provides these normative ideas any determination; instead, a “normative monism” leads to a Supernormativismus abstractly supervening upon social and political realities.⁹

But it is Fredric Jameson’s uncompromising critique of the ascendancy of moral terms to characterize political phenomena that most eloquently epitomizes the terms of denunciation: “In our time, ethics, wherever it makes its reappearance, may be taken as a sign of an intent to mystify, and in particular to replace the more complex and ambivalent judgments of a more properly political and dialectical perspective with the more comfortable simplifications of a binary myth.”¹⁰ Or as he subsequently put it apropos of the celebration of the end of history, the sudden reemergence of liberal pleas for “political morality” are symptomatic of a diremption from history proper, which is why he cast this phenomenon not as a turn to ethics but as a properly postmodern return, an epochal regression that colonizes and thus arrests genuinely political thinking.¹¹ More recently, Jameson writes about how “the return to ethics as a philosophical subdiscipline and its subsequent colonization of political philosophy is one of the most regressive features and symptoms of the ideological climate of postmodernity” and contemptuously characterizes “the ethical binary” par excellence, good/evil, as “an immense swindle.”¹² Regressions sharply registered by Régis Debray across the Atlantic, who, as part of a scathing indictment of the “moral narcissism” of the ethical turn, has written about how “the reappearance of this language of values is never a good omen,” especially in a moralist guise (which Debray sardonically calls moralitaire) that could be characterized in terms of acquiescence to a normalized present, the present of “ethics after practice.”¹³ This is worrisome, according to Debray, because it signifies an enfeebling of political life, and its attendant forms of action, at the hands of an ethical politics that excludes any alternative to the prevalent order. “A consistent feature of the moral style,” Debray further writes, “is that it ‘destroys the verb and inflates the name.’”¹⁴ A nomination that, while hardly shying away from pleading for violence in the name of ethical humanitarianism, nevertheless abjures any sense of political responsibility for the destruction enacted. “Ethical” and “cosmopolitan” wars and “humanitarian interventions” are its expressions.¹⁵

Closer to the world of Anglo-American academic political theory, other critics have eloquently decried the turn to ethics. Chantal Mouffe, for instance, associates the turn to ethics with “a sort of moralizing liberalism,” which turns out to be a somewhat unaware culprit that is “filling the void left by the collapse of any project of real political transformation.”¹⁶ In the United States, as Wendy Brown’s crisp account of the most recent, postmodern fin de siècle suggests, not only has “moralism” emerged as an antipolitics, it equally betrays political despair among American left liberals: “Despite its righteous insistence on knowing what is True, Valuable, or Important, moralism as a hegemonic form of political expression, a dominant political sensibility, actually marks both analytic impotence and political aimlessness—a misrecognition of the political logics now organizing the world, a concomitant failure to discern any direction for action, and the loss of a clear object of political desire.”¹⁷

All these writers, to be sure, acutely grasp aspects and symptoms of the turn to ethics in the North Atlantic world. What has emerged, according to them, is a vast project of political transformation carried out under ethical guises. Clinching victory in the cold war, the North Atlantic West has inaugurated a new nomos of the earth. Domestically, this order is characterized by variations of depoliticized politics that structure the political field in terms of ethical politics, moralism, and moralizations. Internationally, it is defined by ethical formulations of human rights and responsibility to protect, often brigaded to wage war. And yet critics of the turn to ethics have yet to sufficiently record and conceptualize its conceptual, historical, and political conditions of possibility beyond the usual commonplaces about the cold war and neoliberalism. It is one thing to describe a phenomenon, another thing to narrate it, and yet another to explain it. More precisely, critiques of the ethical turn have, for the most part, offered little by way of a careful elucidation of its lineages, theoretical tenets, and political contours, let alone a thorough historicization beyond the perfunctory contextualization that signals 1989–91 as a watershed, a turning point whose particular contours are often only vaguely defined.

A critical account of the theoretical armature and historical advent of this turn requires more conceptual and historical precision than has been offered to date. What exactly is the turn to ethics? How did it eventuate as a transatlantic phenomenon paving the way for a revival of a depoliticized conception of ethical responsibility? Answering these questions requires not only mapping the ethical turn but also historicizing it. What follows is a “metacommentary” on the ethical turn that seeks to historicize it and thus explain its historical and political determinants. It is a critical mapping and historicization of the ethical turn that inverts its priorities and frames and recasts its ethical tenets both historically and politically.¹⁸ Doing so not only requires grasping the actual theoretical and political content of the ethical turn, along with its thought forms, which bear their own immanent logics and presuppositions, but also re-cognizing its moralization of political life as a politically driven feint, as a diversion from a political understanding of a world largely defined by liberal-democratic capitalist ascendance and the defeat of the radical left. This metacommentary seeks to grasp the ethical turn’s historical objectivity and its intrinsic “politicalness,” rather than take its ethical supplementation of political life at face value. In other words, the ethical colonization of political life is an eminently political strategy. When it comes to the turn in question, historical forces have led to political neutralization through ethical politics, not just ethical supplementation, as part of a larger epochal shift in the North Atlantic world. Neutralization and pacification, accordingly, emerge as central political valences of the turn to ethics. All these intertwined processes have emerged at a transatlantic political juncture encompassing the advent of neoliberalism (in England and the U.S.), liberalism and subsequently neoliberalism in France, individualization at the domestic and international levels, and the onset of disaffiliation and depoliticized politics.

Despite genealogies seeking to trace the contemporary advent of human rights to the trials and tribulations that defined the droit l’homme during the transatlantic age of revolutions, or from the perspective of the age of catastrophes of the twentieth century, the ascendance of human rights has a relatively recent history. This ideology belongs to the same historical matrix as the ethical turn, as both are the result of a concatenation of events that crystallized in the late seventies and early eighties, gaining further ascendance with the end of the cold war.¹⁹ The most obvious historical determinants of the current salience of human rights include the final blow against the political activism of the sixties; the global defeat of anti-imperialism and the disenchantment with the immediate fate of third world nations; the rise of the figure of the “dissident”; the need for a new narrative of American imperial dominance after the debacle of Vietnam; the discrediting of organized radical politics, especially Marxism, and the demise of Euro-communism; and the rising tide of neoliberalism. That these were the dominant determinants mediating the ascendancy of this discourse can be easily surmised by considering how “the initial breakthrough for human rights” was a weapon in the arsenal of the “anti-totalitarian” front of the seventies in France and thus highly selective in its invocations.²⁰ Similarly, coeval with the emergence of human rights was neoliberalism, with many parallels in their historical eventuation and undoubted affinities to depoliticized politics, even if their respective political and historical logics cannot be collapsed.²¹ This constellation eventually paved the way for the dedifferentiations that characterize the moralization of international politics: in Samuel Moyn’s formulation, “today, human rights and humanitarianism are fused enterprises, with the former incorporating the latter and the latter justified in terms of the former.”²² All of this further converged with the ethical concern about genocide and the ensuing imperative of “never again”: yet another rhetorical device gaining dominance in the North Atlantic world with the end of the cold war; an imperative that became part and parcel of the dehistoricized consecration of the Holocaust as a negative foundation of North Atlantic ecumene, its “global civil religion.”²³

Amidst all these dedifferentiations emerged a moralized politics that conflates the negative element of “catastrophe prevention” with the more positive task of world ordering; or, stating it differently, world ordering is sanctioned by preemptively debarring an alternative to it in the name of past catastrophes. Hence the elective affinities with cold war liberalism and the counterrevolutionary impetus that drove it forward. Herein the past becomes an ambiguous resource: even if this particular human rights discourse is nourished by an account of the past, it shrewdly severs it from the present; namely, the catastrophe is past, while the present, which is no longer catastrophic, is atoning for the past catastrophe and thus steadily resolute about preventing forms of political action that may threaten the liberal-democratic-capitalist status quo.²⁴ Emancipatory projects are thus cast as threat, as harbingering a recurrence of the catastrophe. The present is at once legitimated by a past catastrophe and dirempted from it, cast as discontinuous, as the time after. Yet this after colonizes the future. It paradoxically looks forward to a future that is nonetheless consonant with the political mainstay and structural imperatives of the present. Accordingly, it cloaks itself with the legitimacy that comes from becoming the custodian of the memory of the recent catastrophe and its portended break from it, while rendering invisible the underlying continuities between past catastrophes and ongoing ones.

In this way the catastrophic nature of the era that had just come to an end is tacitly cast as the logical upshot of the dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution. History has ended. And in this new situation, in which the dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution is brought to a halt, fidelity to human rights anchored in a sort of “transnational individualism,” to borrow Étienne Balibar’s fitting phrase, prevents any resumption of it.²⁵ Human rights after catastrophe thus debar emancipatory politics and seek to pacify the political field, aiming at a political neutralization that forecloses the conditions for the resurgence of past catastrophes in the future. The convergence of these narratives into a legitimating ideology has the effect of instilling a politically driven ethical imperative that has sought to depoliticize and dehistoricize political conflicts, thus severing them from their historical contexts, which were often politically contradictory and complex, and reducing them to an ethical narrative structured by binaries like good and evil, heroes and villains, saviors and survivors, in a politically driven “antipolitical morality.”

This is not to say that human rights needs to be consigned to a rationalization of domination, as merely the moral capital of the North Atlantic West.²⁶ Quite the contrary, the overall point is how a particular discourse of human rights, in and of itself one political manifestation of a larger theoretical and political inheritance, has elective affinities with the basic tenets of a particular political order and how it is deployed to legitimize it. Conversely, whether or not activists, or advocates and international lawyers, intend to have an apologetic effect, or are even aware of it, is not at issue here. But what demands critical explanation are the historical and structural determinants that serve as conditions of possibility for the effectiveness of these forms of advocacy and how they not only legitimize but also acquiesce to the rise of this new nomos of the earth and furnish it with a new imperial narrative, a normative supplement, for a world order led by U.S. imperial hegemony.²⁷ That, of course, does not preclude moments of related autonomy for ethical politics; indeed, for the invocation of ethics to be effective, qua ideology, and thus continue to provide the necessary moral capital for what are otherwise imperial ventures, ethical politics needs to preserve a modicum of autonomy vis-à-vis the ends they are meant to serve in the current world order. And on those occasions in which the capitalist order is not at stake, or a powerful or politically sensitive geopolitical ally is not involved (say, Israel), these could be put to work on ethical grounds, even if such moralized deployment often fundamentally distorts and misrecognizes the nature of the conflict in question, as was recently the case in the dominant narrative about Darfur.²⁸

In this dominant narrative the cold war is cast as an interval in which liberalism had to carve a centrist, neutral, space between the extreme violence of revolution and counterrevolution. Tacitly built into this account is the rhetorical conflation of these two poles along with the exoneration of liberalism. The cold war, then, is interpreted as an interval, a derailing of normal history—just like the “real existing socialism” that was coeval to it—and its ending represented a return to the norms laid out by Nuremberg (1945–1946), the Geneva Convention (1948), and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). In a popular narrative that took hold across the Western chancelleries during the nineties, the full implementation of these agreements, after the hiatus of the cold war and the conclusion of its violent cycle of revolution and counterrevolution, marks a return to normalcy. In Robert Meister’s trenchant but accurate depiction, the political discourse of human rights that thus emerged constituted “a fin de siècle triumphalism that sees human rights as a global secular religion, prophesized at the end of World War II and proselytized in the ‘third wave democratizations’ that accompanied the long wind-down of the Cold War.”²⁹ A self-styled restoration that encompasses more than the spread and implementation of these norms: rather, it portends a transmogrification of the ethical valences—responsibility, accountability, justice—that it embraced for the sake of an eminently political project that inherits the problematic of containment associated with counterrevolution during the past century.

What are the main tropes and narrative categories conforming this particular narrative of human rights? How are human rights narrated in this particular discourse-cum-ideology? What is the temporality its theoretical articulations and forms betray? Meister’s account of the rise of a liberal ideology of human rights has dissected the temporality underpinning current mainstream invocations and apologies of human rights. He calls this temporality the rhetoric of “after evil,” but “before justice,” and shows how it reverses the terms of political discourse by positing a catastrophic, evil event as a caesura in historical time. In this late-twentieth-century theodicy, human rights discourse emerges as the only ethical and political response to a past evil, thus preempting any form of emancipatory politics.³⁰ Emancipatory politics and movements, especially in their socialist guises, are precisely what advocates of this ethical turn blankly associate with the onset of the evil event in the first place. Meister sardonically but aptly characterizes contemporary human rights discourse as “a set of cultural techniques that allow individuals to disavow the collective wishes on which past struggles were based in much the way that missionaries get pagans to renounce their violent pagan gods.”³¹ Yet there is more at stake in these powerful disavowals than the temporality they involve. For what is at stake is a displacement of any sense of political responsibility for an ethical one, of collective responsibility for individual accountability. Instead of a robust sense of justice, and the forms of political reordering and economic redistribution that it imposes, the liberal human rights discourse casts its shadow backward to a catastrophic moment to which fidelity is owed.

Central to the ethical turn is the decollectivization of political responsibility and the displacement of the collective connotations of this concept, thus eschewing its political and critical import, by an increasingly individualist conception that often conflates responsibility with criminal accountability. In this context, a domestically anchored individualism found its cosmopolitan correlate in a transnational individualism. Concretely, this transmogrification could be discerned by looking at the ways in which any comprehensive account of injustice, structural and institutional, is debarred from these accounts and how the agents that benefit from unjust orders—active defenders, perpetrators, or passive beneficiaries—are disaffiliated from any class or collective political identity; accordingly, their responsibility is solely cast in individual terms. Still, how do beneficiaries of an unjust, often oppressive, order come to be identified with the victims after its passing? Meister goes on to elaborate the complex mechanisms of collective identification and symbolic representation that characterize the tacit, if real, exoneration of old beneficiaries in the new order, where they refashion themselves with renewed zeal. In the temporal meantime of “after evil but before justice,” Meister writes, “the newly self-aware beneficiary of past sacrifice wants not to be identified as a would-be (or would-have-been) perpetrator and thus acknowledges the innocence of all historical victims.”³² Konrad Adenauer’s Germany along with the myth of almost universal French resistance in World War II constitute well-known examples of this mechanism at work and the forms of self-imposed amnesia it entailed. One of Adorno’s most caustic expressions about Adenauer’s Germany at the time clearly captures the spirit of this logic: “In the house of the hangman one should not mention the noose; one might be suspected of harboring resentment.”³³

One can also adduce post-Franco Spain and post-Pinochet Chile as these classic signposts of so-called transitions to democracy betray a similar logic; transitions during which even the architects of the old order are tacitly, if not explicitly, insulated from justice, where denizens are so grateful for the restoration of basic civil liberties (and the tacit erasure of the acquiescence of many to the old order) that any just alternative to the new order is viscerally denounced, often by invoking a dehistoricized, amnesiac fable about the recent past. In these contexts the binary of good and bad victim—good: those victims that acquiesce with the status quo; bad: those who decry it—structures public discourse, while past structural beneficiaries are exonerated in a virtual ocean of universal victimhood. Becoming a militant for the new order, after evil—where the masses exhausted from long-lasting violent repression are grateful for a modicum of freedom and, for the most part, may be trusted not to tamper with, let alone compromise, the capitalist order and its attendant liberal-democratic forms—thus hardly requires addressing the structures of injustice past and their continuities in the present.

Even if the new order unbinds this past beneficiary-turned-militant, this militant conversion seldom demands a confrontation with “the unjust origin of those gains or his fear of those who presently suffer because of them.”³⁴ Just think of the Latin American discourse of human rights, which contrary to legend is not much more robustly political than North Atlantic versions.³⁵ It rather consists of a modality of depoliticized politics: namely, a defensive ethical politics after the breakdown of leftist emancipatory projects. Human rights offered an ethical politics that effectively scaled back from more robust emancipatory projects and sought to build coalitions on the basis of a negative politics. That such negative politics is hardly negligible deserves emphasizing: eradicating dictatorships and denouncing their violent practices, notoriously torture, are crucial political goals. But it remains a defensive politics without an offensive beyond the parameters bestowed by the transitions. In its name the implementation of political orders that could be trusted not to trample with capitalist regimes of accumulation, its relations of production and reproduction, was undertaken.³⁶ As such, despite the rejection of cold war topoi by many of its advocates, human rights effectively represented the inheritance of the counterrevolutionary vocation of the cold war, not its transcendence.

Contemporary iterations of human rights discourse, accordingly, rely on a perverted dialectic of the global and the local with a strong depoliticizing effect: “A perverse effect of a globalized ‘ethic’ of protecting local human rights is to take the global causes of human suffering off the political agenda,” just as it disavows the North’s responsibility for these forms of suffering and how these are politically constituted; conversely, “the primacy of the global over the local, which was once the basis of a directly political imperialism, is here ostensibly humanized and offset by the primacy of the ethical over the political.”³⁷ In these intersections, as Esther Benbassa has eloquently articulated, suffering, as a trope, remains; but it crystallizes as spectacle, thus “dispensing us of the need to feel the kind of empathy that reminds us of our responsibilities”; rather, it “borders on a form of liberating voyeurism.”³⁸ The political valences of historically constituted and socially sanctioned situations are thus disavowed at the altar of abstract ethical commands to ameliorate suffering.

Replacing the political with the ethical thus entails not only the avowal, however tacit, of depoliticized politics but also the reduction of the ethical to its most solipsistic connotations and the rejection of any political and historical contextualization of extreme violence and the dismissal of any account of “structural violence” or a politics of violence that interrogates the dialectic of conversion at the heart of institutionalized, normalized, and routinized violence.³⁹ Correspondingly, an intrasubjective account of responsibility replaces political responsibility; a particular ethics dislodges politics; political life is moralized while ethical life depoliticized; and any robust form of political commitment is either pathologized or demonized.

If this particular discourse of human rights is the most visible political upshot of the ethical turn, there are others, more oblique but no less central, that could be more readily grasped in theoretical forms. These politically infused displacements of the political, its colonization by the ethical, its subsumption, as it were, rely on conceptual elisions, one of which has been cogently dissected by Jacques Rancière.

At the very outset of his critique, Rancière notes the rather imprecise sense of “ethics” that abounds in discussions of the ethical turn at the hands of both advocates and critics. The turn to ethics is often cast “as a general instance of normativity that enables one to judge the validity of practices and discourses operating in the particular spheres of judgment and action. Understood in this way, the ethical turn would mean that politics or art are increasingly subjected today to moral judgments about the validity of their principles and the consequences of their practices.”⁴⁰ In this formulation Rancière echoes other critics who have decried the extent to which moral criteria and categories are deployed to judge other fields—say, the political and the aesthetic fields—and thus replace immanently conquered, or hard-won, principles of autonomous critique.⁴¹ But immediately after this assertion Rancière offers a demurrer. As he puts it, “The reign of ethics is not the reign of moral judgments over the operations of art or of political action”; rather, it signifies something else: “the constitution of an indistinct sphere where not only is the specificity of political and artistic practices dissolved, but also what was actually the core of the old term morals: the distinction between fact and law, what is and what ought to be. Ethics amounts to the dissolution of the norm into the fact—the identification of all forms of discourse and practice under the same indistinct point of view.”⁴² Ethics thus constitutes a placeholder that subsumes distinctions and dedifferentiates spatialized logics and practices of power and judgment, while norming and idealizing the present, what is, and disavowing any emancipatory alternative to it. The empire of normativity is one recognizable name for Rancière’s “indistinct point of view.”

What the ethical turn involves, in Rancière’s account, is the positing of “the identity between an environment, a way of being and a principle of action,” as opposed to an ethical articulation of the forms of subjective orientations that sustain a democratic politics, and its political forms, albeit he does not mention the latter. Still, he writes: “The contemporary ethical turn is the specific conjunction of these two phenomena. On the one hand, the instance of evaluating and choosing judgment finds itself humbled before the power of the law that imposes itself. On the other hand, the radicality of this law that leaves no other choice is nothing but the simple constraint stemming from the order of things. The growing indistinction between fact and law brings about an unprecedented dramaturgy of infinite evil, justice and redemption.”⁴³ This rather inscrutable formulation is eventually unpacked through interpretations of films and other works of art. Suffice it now to indicate what constitutes its central contention: the dedifferentiation of the politically crucial distinction between law and ethics. This collapsing is one among the many other dedifferentiations that have characterized the onset of postmodernity along with the smothering of historicity.⁴⁴

But the dedifferentiation of these fields, the colonization of the political field by the ethical, as it were, has political consequences, as it establishes the monotheistic conceits of the current “law of the earth” and restructures the political field in ways in which any challenge of this ethical code is moralistically excluded. Drawing from Brecht’s St. Joan of the Stockyards, Rancière writes, “The division of violence, morality, and right has a name. It is called politics.”⁴⁵ Or, stated differently, the realm of political life is the space in which these divisions are addressed, and through politics different configurations of “violence, morality, and right” are actualized, apprehended, criticized, and rectified. It is within the realm of political life that the mediations between contending moralities and rights occur. A mediation that is further mediated, and in the last instance arbitrated, by the structuring of the political situation in which the conflict unfolds and predicaments of power are inaugurated. Or, as Argentine philosopher León Rozitchner once forcefully argued, the conflict is often between a reigning morality and an alternative ethics, and what is at stake is not moral conduct but collective life.⁴⁶ It is precisely this distinction that the ethical turn elides and recasts in moralist, often melodramatic, terms.

Yet, once a new nomos has been inaugurated, the conflict is no longer between ethics and the law or between two ethics. Instead, it is between an all-encompassing ethical order and its enemies. One can interpret what takes place at the onset of a neutralization of the political field, and the emergence of an ethical nomos, as the restaging and depoliticization of political conflict. It is no longer the realist sobriety emblematized by Brecht’s political ethic—which recognized that “only violence helps where violence reigns” without consecrating violence—rather, it is a politics of consensus under the guise of humanitarianism that authorizes violence in the name of averting evil, while undermining the conceptual and political distinctions from which it could be challenged. Rather than politics disrupting an ossified consensus of political symbolization, what emerges is an increasingly dedifferentiated sense of collective life in which an ontological trauma, or all-encompassing, unnameable or nonrepresentable evil, or, perhaps, an originary catastrophe, binds us all. Moral categories displace political ones, enmity lines are drawn ethically, not politically, and a reversal of temporality, as Meister also shows, takes place—all of which are central to understanding what the ethical turn has entailed: “First of all, it is a reversal of the flow of time: time turned towards the ends to be realized—progress, emancipation, or the other—is replaced by time turned towards the catastrophe that is behind us. And it is also a leveling of the very forms of that catastrophe.”⁴⁷ The dedifferentiation and decontextualization of past catastrophes and their narratives, not to speak of their present-day mediations, are plainly at work here.⁴⁸ In them, ontological categories, including Evil, Violence, Catastrophe, and (pace Rancière) the Other are hypostatized. Rather than a temporally and spatially differentiated map of the political situation, what is posited is an undifferentiated and dehistoricized universal situation from which only a variation of liberalism can save us.

Accordingly, for Rancière the ethical turn signifies the neutralization, if not eradication, of politics in any meaningful way. Nowadays, however, what he calls its soft version—“the soft ethics of consensus”—and its accommodation and relative neutralization of radicalism, has been trumped by its hard version—“the hard ethics of infinite evil”—which, in its devotion “to the never-ending grieving of the irremediable catastrophe,” represents the expunging of political radicalism tout court. This neutralization is dominant, while politicization is increasingly residual. Like Meister, Rancière relates this neutralization to a shift in the temporal understanding informing the hegemonic liberal-capitalist discourse.⁴⁹ In light of it, he sensibly recommends the abandonment of “any theology of time,” which, one might add, is a displacement of one turn for another one (from ethics to theology), as the messianic and miraculous versions of theological feints abstractly posit.

The most searching examination of the conceptual dedifferentiations in the turn to ethics is found in Gillian Rose’s works, as part of her formidable, if a tad idiosyncratic, engagements with an impressive number of thinkers and schools of thought, including the Hegelian-Marxist dialectical legacy. Out of these engagements, Rose forges a trenchant critique of the ethical turn, which prefigures and often surpasses subsequent criticisms. The introduction to The Broken Middle powerfully heralds the Hegelian terms of her uncompromising critique of deconceptualization: “The owl of Minerva has spread her wings,” reads the opening sentence, which is then followed in the best Hegelian tradition by a plea for comprehension and a powerful invocation of speculative philosophy’s critical import and hope that the watershed emblematized by the end of the cold war would led to a revitalization of critical thought.⁵⁰ Obviously, 1989 led precisely to the exact opposite. Rather than a sober conceptual and political reckoning with the new predicaments of power, and the challenges of the contemporary situation in its concrete historical manifestations, what emerged was a refusal to engage in the kind of comprehension that Rose’s utopian realism avows. The title of one of her books neatly illustrated this refusal and the mood sustaining it: rather than the reinvigoration of critical thinking galvanized around collective endeavors, mourning became the law.

This melancholic ambience of aberrant mourning, in which loss became a fin de siècle marker of the mood of the North Atlantic left, coalesced with the rise of a despairing antinomian philosophy. In place of “an investigation into the failures of modern regimes of law,” Rose writes, a “new ethics of the Other” has emerged, one in which, while putatively positing great ethical demands—sometimes even invoking infinity—it exonerates itself from the political dilemmas of law and ethics. She writes: “Non-intentional, new ethics expiates for the unexamined but imagined despotism of reason. As a result, the non-representational, non-institutional, non-intentional ethics leaves principled, individual autonomy and its antinomy, general heteronomy, unaddressed and effective. De facto, it legitimizes the further erosion of political will.”⁵¹ Just like one of Theory’s terms of art, difference emblematized the critique of “theoretical reason” in the eighties and nineties—and, in its recasting in the jargon of deconstruction, as “différance,” it carried a signature deconceptualization—“the Other” became “the hallmark of practical anti-reason” (5).

Rose goes on to unpack the theoretical and political stakes in this new ethics by parsing out the ways in which it occludes the crises that constitute its historical and political determinants. She sees this as a fundamental mistake that displaces reason rather than tarrying with it, and thus leaves the crises in question unattended. “One mistake has been replaced by another in three senses,” she writes: “the initial mistake is not properly described; the ‘Other’ is misrepresented; and the remedy proposed is self-defeating” (5).

Rose illustrates the first mistake by utilizing an architectural analogy: “Le Corbusier has been blamed for the failings of modern architecture,” and his aims, which were “humanist and emancipatory” are instead represented as “surveillant and controlling;” a misrepresentation that betrays a failure to consider how “the intervening institutions” have mediated the meanings and intentions of Le Corbusier. A properly critical investigation of these institutions would complicate things by examining “the intended meaning (idea) to built form or material configuration in order to comprehend how the outcome of idea and act is effected by the interference of meanings, that is, by institutions, which were not taken into account in the original idea but which mediate its attempted realization” (6–7). Rose then trenchantly brings her analogy to bear on the ethical reductions of the Other: “new ethics, in effect, intends a new transcendence, a purified reason, for it proceeds without taking any account of institutions which are extraneous to its idea, that is, without taking any account of mediation. It intends to affirm ‘the Other,’ but it ignores the actuality of its intentions. With no social analysis of why political theory has failed, new ethics will be recuperated within the immanence which it intends to transcend” (7). There are two aspects of these passages worth considering: first, the sober realism embedded in the reminder about intentions and actions, inner autonomy, however fictitious, and outer heteronomy, which is very real; second, the awareness of the persistence of new ethics within the obdurate immanence of what is, as opposed to its concrete transcendence, which only a sober reckoning with genuine political theory could begin to encompass. It is along these lines that Rose invites readers to consider “a far more difficult thought,” which she formulates as follows: “it is the very opposition between morality and legality—between inner, autonomous ‘conscience,’ and outer, heteronomous institutions—that depraves us. Simultaneous possession of inner freedom and outer unfreedom means that the border where cognitive activity and normative passivity become cognitive passivity and normative activity is changeable and obscure” (35). The basic mistake of the new ethics is to fundamentally misrecognize the constitutive gap between intention and effect, and how that gap is thoroughly mediated by a political situation, its ordering and structures. And these structures are historically constituted structuring structures, mediating this constitutive gap but never closing it.

New ethics is a depoliticizing discourse that nonetheless acquiesces with the imperatives of the status quo by debarring these mediations from critical consideration, both in their conceptual architecture and prescriptions. In place of the triad of cs—cognition, critique, comprehension—informing Rose’s Hegelian project, what emerged in the North Atlantic intellectual fold were the binaries and dyads that characterized many of the turns that took place with the consolidation of Theory in the United States and the most sophisticated formulations of liberalism of the past decades. Elsewhere, Rose has caustically referred to these binaries as “judged oppositions” that, while claiming playfulness, are, on the contrary, quite ossified. That is, a series of displacements in which the historically constituted gaps between law and right are occluded, while conceptual and institutional mediations are disavowed. These judgments, she forcefully writes, replace “conceptuality with ‘discourses,’ critique with ‘plurality,’ conceptuality with ‘the Other,’ renouncing in general any association with law or with mediation.”⁵² Or as she frames the question in Mourning Becomes the Law, the quest for “an uncontaminated ethics” is part and parcel of a disavowal of equivocation that the ethical turn, no less than other forms of political illiteracy, embodies: “Wisdom works with equivocation.”⁵³ Heirs of Levinas and neo-Kantians—in the quest for pristinely apodictic, ontological, or preontological moments outside of history and predicaments of power or independently of these—disavow this insight, both intellectually and politically. Equally eschewed is the constitutive gap of any historically literate ethic, political or not: that is, the constitutive gap between intention and effect and how the ways that gap becomes ethically and politically meaningful is thoroughly mediated by the imperatives and practices structuring the situations in which encounters with others, practices of freedom and autonomy, are rendered concrete, enacted, and actualized.

In one of her most evocative formulations of the critical vocation of philosophy, Rose deploys another triad—eros, attention, acceptance—and how it is unconventionally recast in light of her critique of the turns of Theory and the so-called death of philosophy so prevalent during the nineties: “The much-touted ‘end of philosophy,’ postmodernism, has sacrificed these connections by defining ‘eros’ as lack, ‘attention’ as deconstruction, ‘acceptance’ as mourning. This restricts instead of enlarging reason, which is maligned as sheer domination.”⁵⁴ In Rose’s rendering, moreover, rather than mending the relation of law and ethics, what the ethical turn effectively achieves is their subsumption in theological or (quasi) ontological categories and discourses, which are ultimately external to the particular problematic itself—that is, posited abstractly and unmediated by the historical nature of the situation that prompted the problematic in question in the first place.

In Rose’s account both the proponents of the ethical turn and some of its critics disavow what she terms the triune dimension of political life—universal, particular, singular—while also theoretically foreclosing the possibility for critical mappings of their mutual mediations. The contradictions between law and right, ethics and politics, as well as between different political ethics, are thus deconceptualized. But these displacements are, at best, a way of sidestepping the question and, at worst, a way to occlude it. Phrased differently, “We cannot opt out of the difficulty of ethics and law…to rediscover ‘the passage from the non-ethical to the ethical,’ for in so doing we discredit ethics once again by exalting it beyond the way of the world, replacing the broken with the holy middle. If we so do, we collude in the diremptions we intend to sublate.”⁵⁵ What is at stake in Rose’s critique of the ethical turn is a refusal to take ethical considerations out of the historically constituted world, out of its political and profane history.

Rose’s critique of the ethical turn entails a re-cognition of the political situations in which ethics and politics emerge and how their mediations—interdependence, contradiction, or both—and intersections demand a different understanding of the relation between ethics and politics; namely, a political ethic adept at comprehending the sociological texture of collective life and the tragic dimension of political action and political life. Philosophy alongside social and political thought—all of these thought forms need to be brought to bear to properly understand the complex intersections between ethics and politics, ethics and law, soul and city.⁵⁶ Only by acknowledging that there is no pristine standpoint outside the entwinement of authority, domination, and exploitation, in predicaments of power, and how these conform to structures that we constantly negotiate politically, can an adequate rendering of the ethical and political dilemmas of collective life be reached.

What are the historical determinants—intellectual and political—for the emergence of this turn to ethics? The main tributaries feeding the currents of the ethical turn, which increasingly gained recognition in Europe in the eighties, and notoriety from the nineties on, stream mostly from France and, to a lesser degree, Germany. The critical juncture for the rise of the ethical turn dates to the revolts of the summer of 1968—effectively, a planetary concatenation of events—and their aftermaths in Europe.⁵⁷ In the judgment of intellectual historian Julian Bourg, 1968 is the central crucible: “After 1968 ethics gradually became a preferred term, lens, and framework for grappling with many aspects of life: from interpersonal relationships (matters of desire, sex, and gender) to institutions (universities, prisons, and psychiatric hospitals) to politics (violence, law, the state, and human rights).”⁵⁸ If, in terms of participation, the protests in Italy were the only comparable instance to the massive protests in France, in terms of the cultural and ideological impact of their ethical legacies on the Anglo-American scene, the French and German revolts stand apart. With very few exceptions of note, the lineages of the ethical turn run from French predicaments of power, and the master thinkers who inhabited these predicaments, all the way to their Anglo-American avatars, all of whom in one way of another partake in this French legacy.⁵⁹

Whereas from 1968 on, in both Germany and France, the language of ethics became the favored nomenclature to frame and deal with political questions, the differences in the contours of the ethical undertones, as well as the lineages, are striking. The 1968 German scene, for instance, is markedly different from the French and Italian in at least three respects: in Germany, 1968 represented a reckoning with the “Nazi generation” and the political and ethical questions that such a generational confrontation entailed; in doing so, and here is the second contrast, it drew from a coherent and well-established autochthonous body of work, the Frankfurt School, and its actions were explicitly informed by these theoretical traditions (not to dwell on a direct and fairly sophisticated connection with the writings of Marx). Another, equally continuous, tradition those involved in the German scene drew from was the native tradition of romanticism, which nourished thinkers across the ideological spectrum, from Friedrich Schlegel to Walter Benjamin.⁶⁰ Green politics is thus a direct descendant of 1968; and so are the Baader-Meinhoff group. What both shared of this common matrix are the ethical overtones of their rhetoric even in the most politically minded expressions of their concerns. In the case of Green politics, an ethically cast ecology has been its leitmotif; in contrast, a staunch ethics of conviction, initially curbed by a sense of responsibility, had been the calling card of the RAF, even if it became increasingly pietistic and brutal as the initial imprisoned generation lost its grip on the movement it triggered.⁶¹ So-called revolutionary action pivoted on a modality of ethical politics of revolt; 1968 in Germany was, first and foremost, an ethical movement that evolved into, and continued to feed, a political one.⁶² Green politics and the RAF are the two main poles defining the ethical politics of the legacy of 1968 in Germany.

But what are the intellectual ones? Within the Frankfurt School there were plenty of ethical, romantic, and aesthetic motifs at work, yet conceptualizations of the political field and its autonomous imperatives were sparse at best. In Adorno’s reckoning with Auschwitz, there was already a concern with ethical motifs. But while politically driven and alert, Adorno’s critical reflections never conceptualized the political realm as an autonomous field of power, let alone political life and its imperatives. Ethical reflection, however, did find expression in his works. Proponents of an ethical Adorno have made much of these motifs. Suffice it for now to state their centrality, even while transmogrified, in Adorno’s infamous (and often ill-understood) formulation about poetry after Auschwitz, his invocation of Kantian language to refer to a thoroughly heteronomous new categorical imperative forged to confront conditions of human unfreedom—for humanity “to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen”—and the explicit connections he drew between the ethical lessons of Auschwitz and the present.⁶³ Equally influential on the German scene was Herbert Marcuse’s rhetoric of alienation and denunciation, which had moralist (and romantic) undertones, too. So did, earlier on, the communism of Karl Liebknecht and the Spartacist League, much to the scorn and derision of conservative political realists, especially those closer to the right of the political spectrum (say, as in Carl Schmitt’s scathing critique in Political Romanticism), and the liberal-conservative formulation of responsibility—framed as its antipode—as found in Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation.”

Accordingly, the ethical message of Adorno’s political interventions during the sixties exerted significant influence on the ethical cast of the German politics of 1968, albeit not despoiled of a political and critical edge—an edge that would become significantly dulled in the reworking of this ethical impulse in Jürgen Habermas’s formulation (via Karl Otto Apel) of discourse ethics and the bland, liberal-democratic politics of his discourse theory of democracy. Indeed, Habermas’s discourse ethics provided a final conjoining of two emblematic dates that were already entangled—1945 and 1968—as axial years around which a discourse ethics for a new German republic could be built.⁶⁴ But by the eighties these more radical legacies of ethically infused politics increasingly became a distant memory. As with the fate of Adorno’s critical theory, which became something to be academically studied as part of the lineage of the Habermasian enterprise, or as a protodeconstructionist current feeding Theory in the Anglo-American scene, the more politically charged edge had fallen from the purview of political and intellectual discussions. Politically, its most lasting imprint has been left by the Habermasian idealizations of the post-1991 international scene, an ethical politics that has normatively consecrated the new humanitarian nomos of the earth.

In France, in contrast, the legacies of 1968 are, by far, less clearly demarcated, as are the events themselves and the memories of their afterlives.⁶⁵ This murkiness and relative difficulty in delineating its contours partly stem from a well-known French tendency to mythmaking about the event (l’événement).⁶⁶ Yet, it also stems, perhaps even more so, from real political complexities, including the polarization of the post–World War II French political scene, one largely structured by the legacies of revolution and counterrevolution and the presence of the French Communist Party, the Parti communiste français (PCF).⁶⁷ Here, as elsewhere, an antifascist rhetoric was in place, one that had more political valences due to the experience of Vichy than in, say, Britain or the United States; yet it did not have the stridency and immediacy of that of Germany, where referring to the previous generation as “the Auschwitz generation” was far less metaphorical.⁶⁸ Indeed, this overall situation could not be more at variance with that of West Germany. There the Prussian heritage along with other intransigent elites of the ancien régime were soundly defeated along with the Third Reich, no Communist Party was part of the political spectrum, and a staunch orientation to the West had a consensual grip on the political field. But quite the reverse was the situation in France. There the legacies of Vichy and the Resistance were not residual, nor was that of a very recent colonial past, the resolution of which led to a savage and bitterly divisive war whose outcomes were Algerian independence, the abolishment of the Fourth Republic, and the advent of the Fifth. All these were significant actors and events that structured the political and ideological field of the sixties. Sedimentations of this post–World War II political field had a bearing on the revolts of May ’68 and their immediate aftermath.

Internationally, this mass upheaval has to be situated in a larger context of mass protests spanning two decades that it significantly contributed to and has come to define, even if these larger concatenations, with particular ebbs and flows, are hardly irreducible to it: mass mobilizations, where the Vietnam War (the Tet Offensive took place in January ’68) and national liberation movements, especially Algeria, were central themes alongside local particulars defining the immediate situation, and, from the United States to Central America, the Caribbean and the Southern Cone, the inspiration and admonition of the Cuban Revolution. Subsequent political processes, say, the surge of industrial militancy in Italy, the miners’ strike in Britain, and the revolutionary situation in Portugal that ended the Estado Novo (1974), further conform to this historical constellation.⁶⁹ Nationally, the major political conflict structuring the before was the anticolonial war of Algeria, whose tumultuous politics conjoined with the more widespread protests against Vietnam, thus bestowing to class politics and leftist ideals of equality an anti-imperialist cast. Meanwhile, a process of modernization and the centralization of state power was under way, accompanied by the increasing ruthlessness of a militarized police force and the proverbial authoritarian-militaristic aura pervading the figure of Charles de Gaulle. The latter bestowed credibility to the charge of a police state emerging in France, something that resonated with analogous claims across the Rhine. It also led to comparisons and parallels with Vichy, which in turn lent force to antifascist rhetoric. By the time the decade was in full swing, Maoism, or at least a radically unhistorical and distorted version of it, had also become an important source of critique within intellectual and militant circles.

It is within these contexts that the insurrectionary core against authority and hierarchy that defined May 1968 and different incarnations in its aftermath ought to be situated. It revived the politics of class struggle and equality, along with a sense of possibility, yet it was not aimed at taking power, something which has divided opinion ever since.⁷⁰ For advocates of May ’68 that idealize the moment, the extraordinary succession of events in this rather tumultuous month resembles a shooting star: its sudden, exhilarating emergence led to a glowing brightness and then it burnt, leading quickly to an equally sudden demise—a return to normalcy, so to speak. But if the conceit of newness and miraculous imagery that guides interpretations of events as ex nihilo—or as starting ab ovo in the political fantasy of the “clean slate”—is left aside and “events” are historicized, one realizes that its emergence crystallized over a long period of time.

By the same token, the aftermath of ’68 outlasted its suddenness. Indeed, despite the polarization against the PCF by many vocal critics leading up to May ’68 and immediately after, as well as the subsequent increasing depoliticization authorized under the mantel of ’68 by its ethicist heirs—often one and the same—the immediate aftermath had a direct political impact that nourished more conventional leftist politics: an increase in membership for the communist party, a reunified socialist party, and the 1972 historic agreement on a common program leading to the formation of the Union of the Left, which led to nothing less than the restructuring of the political field in the seventies.⁷¹ But the prospect of a rejuvenated left under the tension-ridden but politically compelling socialist common program met with a concerted effort to discredit it. And it is precisely this reaction to the restructuring of the political field that led to the antitotalitarian moment in French politics and thought, which crystallized and further paved the way for an ethical turn in the intellectual realm whose lineage dates back to May ’68.

Thus, for all the contemporary and subsequent talk about the revolutionary nature of these upheavals, rather than a renewal of a revolutionary tradition whose last vestiges were found in the Resistance to Vichy (arguably, the last embodiment in recent French history of the counterrevolution that dates back to the dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution unleashed in 1789), there was another side to the aftermath of 1968 that saw a reaction of a different order.⁷² The concerted alliance against the left overlapped with the momentous publication in France of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which without offering any truly new revelations—the Soviet labor camps had been denounced by Ante Ciliga, David Rousset, and Victor Serge and figured in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins—became crucial ammunition in the crystallization of the antitotalitarian moment in France that the new philosophers and revisionist historians would make their own. In Régis Debray’s caustic formulation, during the 1970s consecration of human rights, with its corollary idealization of “the dissident,” became the signature of a moralizing antitotalitarian moment: “Solzhenitsyn and the [Vietnamese] boat people unveiled communism’s criminogenic nature and inverted the axes of Good and Evil”; with this, the burden of proof changed camps, the villain became the savior; and “with the rediscovery of human rights as the remedy for totalitarianism, the wellbeing of the rich was severed from the woes of the poor. Better: the salvation of the latter hung on the magnanimity of the former, as yesterday’s prison guard became the champion of the convicts.”⁷³ Michael Scott Christofferson—the leading historian of this historical moment—neatly captures the role of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in the wars of position against the left: “In ideological debates of the late 1970s, the gulag was less a revelation than a metaphor, the one word that could represent and legitimize the emerging radical repudiation of communism and revolutionary politics.”⁷⁴

Claude Lefort, for instance, creatively enlisted Solzhenitsyn’s book as part of his original formulation of an “anti-totalitarian” political thought—where he christened the Hungarian revolution of 1956 as “the first anti-totalitarian revolution”—but in other circles it became the rallying metaphor for an intellectually crass, if media-shrewd, circle of so-called new philosophers, who were endorsed by no less an intellectual celebrity than Michel Foucault.⁷⁵ Similarly, ex-communists like François Furet, the leading figure of historical revisionism and ideologue of a centrist liberal credo defined by its animus against Communism and Gaullism, and its quest for the normalization of French politics, became part of what henceforth came to be known as the antitotalitarian moment in French thought.⁷⁶ Indeed, in what turned out to be the most intellectually vibrant output in contemporary French liberalism, this moment ushered the revival of “political philosophy,” which could be traced back to Raymond Aron’s and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s then disciple Lefort, but that led to a concerted effort at liberal normalization, politically couched in moralizing terms, in the hands of Marcel Gauchet and Pierre Rosanvallon.⁷⁷ The long-neglected tradition of French liberalism, for much of the postwar period eloquently if somewhat quixotically represented by Aron, was thus fetched and reworked in an effort that conjoined a staunch anti-Gaullism and anti-Jacobinism (read: anticommunism!) with a strong moralizing import. It inspired responsibility vis-à-vis a normalized political scene—read: a capitalist liberal-democratic order duly exfoliated of “totalitarian temptations,” even if France has never fallen under a totalitarian order—that inspired many transatlantic invocations of political morality and responsibility. Interestingly enough, the massive historical accounts produced by its leading lights, Gauchet and Rosanvallon, have had very little to say about Vichy. In spite of the impeccable liberal credentials of these authorships, the threat of a totalitarianism, which has never taken place on French soil, analytically dislodges the authoritarian, protofascist regime that actually did. Be that as it may, this outlook has yielded a political moralism that, while critical of the pieties of dissidence and human rights of the new philosophers, along with the latter’s insistence that the only remaining task was “to write manuals on ethics,” partook in the moralizing rhetoric built around totalitarianism during the antitotalitarian moment of the seventies.⁷⁸

A number of overlapping, if somewhat contradictory, elements crystallized around the primacy of ethics and the new liberal humanist discourse, at a time in which, according to Daniel Bensaïd, “Libération became ‘liberalisation’ (sic)”; in Perry Anderson’s trenchant yet apt expression, “Paris today is the capital of European intellectual reaction.”⁷⁹ Politically, the unraveling of the leftist union and the subsequent abandonment of socialism by François Mitterrand nailed the coffin of the revolution and, with it, the revolutionary left; intellectually, however, the primacy of ethical discourse has had a longer aftermath around the two axes of responsibility and humanism, which were thoroughly mediated by the antitotalitarian moment and its liberalism. But one thing is intellectual and political history; another the theoretical content of this turn to ethics. Even so, sediments of the former are found in the latter: intellectually and politically, in the words of Bourg, “ethics” emerged as the privileged medium to sort out questions ranging “from interpersonal relationships (especially matters of desire, sex, and gender) to institutions (universities, prisons, and psychiatric hospitals) to politics (violence, law, the state, and human rights).” And this “ethical fascination” certainly sprang from the student revolt of May 1968.⁸⁰ Even if there is no a priori teleology leading from 1968 to the turn to ethics or to one particular form of liberalism, the emergence of ethics as a discourse of depoliticization with more than elective affinities to liberalism was not a random occurrence. There were structural reasons for it, both intellectual and political.

By the end of the seventies, the intellectual legacy of 1968 and the increasing disrepute of revolutionary politics had led to an abandonment of the political ethic of Sartre and Beauvoir for the new ethics, from the increasing salience of Levinas to the late Foucault and the defenders of a liberal, humanitarian credo. While irreducible to liberalism, the ethical turn that emerged out of 1968 had an elective affinity to it in its depoliticizing impulses. Accordingly, the slide into its own version of liberal politics was just a short step: Derrida never went beyond left liberalism; Foucault’s eventual retreat into Hellenistic practices of the self could be interpreted as a tacit acknowledgment of political exhaustion, even if his anti-Marxism and antisocialism are well-documented; and the communism of desire in Anti-Oedipus was radical at the level of theory, metaphor, and trope, while politically rather timid and elusive, even if not entirely acquiescent—yet its antifascism, to be sure, was rather disjointed from the political situation in which this oeuvre emerged. For their part, the likes of Luc Ferry and Alain Renault reacted to what they saw as the nihilism of 1968 with an invocation of “a Kantian ethics of individual responsibility,” while the liberalism of a Derrida was ethically infused with, even marred by, the abstractions of Kantian imperatives, albeit always to the left of Ferry and Renault.⁸¹ Not to speak of Pascal Bruckner and Michel Onfray, two heirs of ’68 whose political whims oscillate between hedonist anarchism and reactionary liberalism, or Alain Finkielkraut, the ever present champion of liberalized human rights. Indeed, it is along the lines of theoretical commitments and the contents of morality that lines of enmity were drawn between the different ethical stands—one representing the spirit of ’68, the other denouncing its nihilistic impulses. Remarkably, despite its different theoretical formulations, it is a frequently depoliticizing and disaffiliated (and thus antidemocratic) ethical discourse. A discourse that in due course emerged as the actual content of the libertarian impulses of ’68.

If, politically speaking, it was the antitotalitarian moment that became a turning point and watershed for the consolidation of the ethical turn in France, in the world of Theory an antiauthoritarian antinomianism became the signature of the age: Derrida is its emblematic master figure, even if his turn to ethical questions only began in earnest from the late eighties on. By the time that Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus reached American shores, duly flanked by a preface penned by Foucault, the legacy of the Resistance along with the radical claims of equality and political possibility had gone through the blender of individualism, desire, and sensual subjectivism.⁸² At a time when the left was on the defensive across the North Atlantic and European worlds, the turn to ethics and intrasubjectivity constituted a retreat from the political world, not dissimilar to the retreat found in some of its early intellectual influences—Stoicism, Epicureanism, Lucretius.

Philosophical antinomianism and French liberalism: these two rather different theoretical and intellectual endeavors, sometimes at odd with each other in the realm of ideas, shared not only a common historical matrix and unmistakably French éclat, but a deep-seated antipathy to leftist party politics, along with anticommunism and anti-Marxism. Le Débat and Tel Quel are emblematic of these poles.⁸³ While Le Débat has been described as a veritable machine de guerre in its programmatic liberalism and antitotalitarian disposition, as well as in its self-appointed role as harbinger of the “political morality,” which it claimed was lacking in the rather irresponsible left, communist and noncommunist, Tel Quel was proudly unengaged (non-engagé)—surely a political stand, even if one that disavows its politicalness—and was defined by an eclectic spirit that sought to bring into a single field of vision, amidst distances and differences, several strands of structuralism and its heirs.⁸⁴ Yet, its self-image notwithstanding, one of the signatures of this eclecticism and call for innovation—the latter a vocation to which it lived up to, as innovative if uneven critical work, ranging from the coruscating to the banal, sometimes in one and the same figure (Julia Kristeva comes to mind), emerged from it—was the effective deconceptualization of theoretical reflection by way of a host of ideas. One example is “intertextuality,” which stemmed from an eminently linguistic and literary (modernist) conception of intellectual life. Therein the nondialectical dedifferentiation of philosophy and literature, concepts and narrative categories—Theory’s signatures, as it were—emerged in full swing. Politically, an antipode of Marxism, Tel Quel contributed to the de-Marxification of French intellectual life and conceitedly took its place amidst intellectual groupuscules mimicking the antipolitical logic of ultraleftism. The final fate of this journal is certainly of little importance here. What is important to record is the crucial role it played in the constitution of the moment of Theory that would travel to the United States under the sign of its leading lights. The streams flowing from this particular concept of philosophy constitute the springs of the ethical turn, with Anglo-American Theory its basin, along with the long-standing tradition of American moralist and ethical politics.⁸⁵

The eighties saw the consolidation of these trends on both shores of the North Atlantic. Even if France had no Reagan or Thatcher, with Mitterrand’s abandonment of the last vestiges of the common program, a truly transatlantic trend of disaffiliation and an ensuing reindividualization took place.⁸⁶ France thus offered a unique constellation: a delayed neoliberalization, yet the concerted effort toward disaffiliation and reindividualization, which received articulation by and support from new philosophers and liberals alike. And with these came discourses of “responsibilization,” making the individual responsible not only for his or her actions in response to a situation, but for the situation itself, or for tasks previously held to be social, and the disavowal of solidarity and any form of welfare safety net that would protect the individual from precarious situations for which he or she is not responsible. Differences of theoretical and cultural orientation aside, these converged in a rabid anticommunism that was constitutive of the antitotalitarian moment against the left in France as well as a rediscovery of Atlanticism: Reaganite or Thatcherite the French were not, but a sort of philo-Americanism existed during the late seventies and eighties as all variants of antitotalitarianism—from Kristeva to Furet—looked excitedly to America.⁸⁷ For instance, the intellectuals associated with Tel Quel and the revisionist historiography of Furet went on to establish American connections. And so did Foucault, arguably the most formidable intellectual figure to embrace the charade of the new philosophers, a stand stemming from its unyielding anticommunism and antipathy to the left’s common program, and, subsequently, Derrida, who in his transatlantic voyages crafted an influential if undercriticized ethical politics. All of which were rooted in a deep-seated anticommunism and all of which converged in the ethical turn, planting the seeds for its American harvest a decade later.

It is not without irony that the most unsettling general insurrection in post–World War II Europe yielded such variations of liberal ethical politics. In spite of the articulation of egalitarianism and antiauthoritarianism, the logic of desire and a French variation of liberal individualism, which made axiomatic an abstract desire for nondomination, is what became of a leftist recasting of the aspirations of 1968. In one possible reckoning, the turn to ethics has not only hijacked the memory of ’68 by casting itself as its only legitimate heir, but in it the language of responsibility and humanism has been despoiled of its more political valences and is complicit with processes of reindividualization and the neutralization of the political field. Even so, to speak of “hijacking” can actually be misleading—for, even if it was not the only heir, it is certainly a legitimate one. Meanwhile, a combination of political defeat, a sense of paradigmatic exhaustion, and liberal assault against the left, with its politics of reaction and restoration, along with its antitotalitarian fever, led many a thinker to retreat from the political into the ethical. At this point, during the late seventies and eighties, the ethical turn effectively became a turning away from politics at best and at worst a strategy of pacification and neutralization with the consolidation of the centrist, normalizing antitotalitarian liberal front of the eighties.

“By the end of the late 1970s and early 1980s,” as Bourg writes, “ethics was bubbling up everywhere.”⁸⁸ The defeat of the Union of the Left in the seventies, the antitotalitarian front composed of French liberals in the tradition of Aron and Furet, alongside the new philosophers and the disappointments with Mitterrand’s socialist government, make the basic coordinates that led to the crystallization of this turn to ethics as one of the most prominent legacies of ’68. An ethical turn that, according to Bourg, was coeval with two other developments: the reassertion of political theory and historical writing as traditionally understood, each with contradictory developments and turns of their own. If ethics, political theory, and history had been brushed aside by the rise and fall of structuralism, they now returned to center stage of French intellectual life. Hence there was an elective affinity between these developments and the reemergence of a triad of ethical thinkers whose politics oscillated within the parameters of the center of the political spectrum: Vladimir Jankélévitch, Paul Ricoeur, and Emmanuel Levinas.

Yet the affinities between the new moralism and traditional moral philosophy were not entirely smooth. In the opening paragraph of his Le paradoxe de la morale, Jankélévitch explicitly registers the ethical fervent that pervaded the French intellectual scene at the time—as the first sentence states, “We are assured that moral philosophy is currently honored”—but meets it with suspicion.⁸⁹ Such pride of place has hardly led to a proper appreciation of the nature of moral philosophy. Actually, Jankélévitch is trenchant and quite blunt in his assessment: “It is doubtful that the crusaders of this new crusade actually know what they talk about.”⁹⁰ Still, he goes on to cast moral philosophy as “le premier problème de la philosophie,” an assertion in sync with the times, as it also signified the subsumption of other forms of inquiry into it. But Jankélévitch’s protestations attest to the conceptual and theoretical looseness of the invocations of ethics and morality in this context, where ethics is frequently conjured as an ill-defined placeholder to anchor the de-Marxification of the French intellectual scene. Even so, it is striking that neither Jankélévitch nor Ricoeur gained much of a footing in the precincts of Theory across the Atlantic. Consider Ricoeur, for instance: a formidable philosophical mind that profoundly meditated on questions of responsibility, offered remarkable contributions to ethics from a hermeneutic and phenomenological sensibility, and is the author of what is arguably the most cogent philosophical account of narrative in the second half of the twentieth century (responsibility, phenomenology, narrative—all putative signposts of Theory!). Yet his commanding body of work, while mostly available in English translation by major university presses, has gained little traction within the context of the ethical turn, even if in not insignificant ways, as a philosopher, Ricoeur is arguably a more substantial figure than Levinas.

So the obvious question is why, out of all the modalities of ethics vying for dominance in the context of the French turn to ethics, Levinas’s ethics gained such transatlantic influence and ascendancy. The most obvious answer is that, in contrast to Ricoeur, Levinas developed what effectively amounts to a deconceptualizing and dedifferentiating philosophical project whose ethical reductions have strong affinities with the dedifferentiations of Theory, and the latter’s hostility to the conceptual bindingness of older philosophical traditions of critique. That is, at any rate, an intellectual explanation. Politically, the “consecration” of Levinas in the French scene could be placed in the context of the rediscovery of the ethical-religious core of Judaism that was part and parcel of the antitotalitarian mood and the effacement of the revolutionary idea in the early eighties.⁹¹ Or one can equally emphasize the coeval rise of neoliberalism and the defeat of the left in the North Atlantic zone, along with the depoliticization of the latter in increasingly pacified political predicaments.⁹² But a closer look at Theory, as a transatlantic phenomenon consecrated in the United States, brings into sharper relief the constellation that made possible the appeal of this subordination of politics to a hypostatization of ethics that Levinas represents. Here the work of Derrida is important. For, in a fundamental way, Levinas traveled to America with Derrida, and both carried Theoretical passports. Derrida’s early essay, “Violence and Metaphysics,” has been rightly depicted as pioneering the scholarship on Levinas in the North Atlantic world. Even so, one of Levinas’s foremost motifs, the theme of responsibility to the Other, remained mostly recessive in Derrida’s seminal writings.⁹³ It only became dominant in the context of Derrida’s subsequent turn to ethics.

Notwithstanding the protestations of the master himself, there is an ethical turn in Derrida’s work, which coalesces with the turn to ethics and the age of neoliberal ascendancy in the North Atlantic world, especially after the end of the cold war.⁹⁴ Philosophically, Derrida’s ethical politics became a solution for the ways in which many of the internal antinomies that his channeling of the legacy of German phenomenology—which was thoroughly mediated by his engagement with structuralism and recast in terms of his signature, brilliant, dedifferentiations of philosophy and literature—led when confronted with political questions and predicaments of power.⁹⁵ Evidence of these antinomian impasses is found in the debates of the early eighties carried on by Derrida’s disciples and the awkward questions raised about the political implications of deconstruction or how it relates to political questions.⁹⁶ Politically, Derrida’s ethical turn was thoroughly mediated by two external determinants that forced upon him a more explicit engagement with questions of ethics in the terrain tilled by the ethical turn in France. These determinants consisted of the virtually simultaneous eruption of two major scandals that were intimately related to the catastrophic history of World War II: the Heidegger and de Man affairs; both of which constituted less than edifying transatlantic debates that nevertheless deeply affected Derrida’s intellectual itinerary.⁹⁷ The end of the cold war provided a context in which Derrida finally felt comfortable articulating the ethical politics of deconstruction.⁹⁸

The voyages of these maîtres a penser led to a displacement of their ideas in a context that initially betrayed and subsequently exacerbated some of the historical and political sediments mediating the armature of their reflections, as these bodies of work became dedifferentiated and subsumed in that piece of Americana that is Theory. For in North Atlantic leftist thought, the ethical turn under consideration occurred under the aegis of what in the humanities scholars refer to as Theory. In the formulation of one of its leading practitioners: “Theory as a genre of works (rather than thinking about thinking) began…as a name for a mixture of philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, aesthetics, poetics, and political and social thought.”⁹⁹ To further dissect and comprehend its depoliticizing impulses, it is important not only to consider the transatlantic voyage of French bodies of work and their christening in the U.S. academy as Theory but also the political situation that gave it a berth on this side of the Atlantic.

In the United States the heyday of Theory converged with a political situation defined by the onset of neoliberalism as a regime of accumulation and the political neutralization of, and the conservative backlash against, the sixties. Its emergence in the New World thus dovetailed with a turn to the right, both intellectually and politically, whose point of transition is perhaps more clearly seen at the intersection between the Carter and Reagan presidencies, when a concerted effort to domestically disavow the sixties and its political legacies coincided with the onset of neoliberalism, patriotic jingoism, and gentrification embodied in Reagan’s mantra “morning in America.” Theory’s arrival also converged and became coeval with a new international situation characterized by the onset of a second cold war, the demise of national liberation movements, and the crisis of internationalist Marxism.¹⁰⁰ By the time that important bearers of the ethical turn secured posts at North American universities, the christening of Theory by academic doyens, mostly visible in strongholds of the humanities like Columbia, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Yale, and, subsequently, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, and Duke was already underway. A conference in Baltimore in 1966, titled “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” is frequently identified as a crucial episode in the emergence of Theory—in Theory’s vernacular, it was an “event” that brought to American comparative literature a hitherto unavailable emphasis on metatheory—even if there is a great deal of disagreement over Theory’s other points of inflections and critical vectors.¹⁰¹

Politically, the traveling of mostly French bodies of work to the United States and the ensuing consolidation of Theory thus took place as the sixties were disavowed in the political arena and forms of political theory committed to participatory democratic politics came under fire, then coming to be discredited in the intellectual field.¹⁰² The American sixties were framed by the participatory values of equality and anti-elitism, an anti-imperialist disposition, and the fight for civil rights for blacks, Latinos, and women. And, in the United States, elements of shared power and a deep concern with political form crystallized in ways that had no exact equivalent in France. Not incidentally, across the Atlantic, Sheldon S. Wolin offered a trenchant depiction of May ’68 and the type of depoliticized revolt it signaled: “The abortive French Revolution of 1968 may be an intimation of the sort of McLuhanesque revolutions in store for advanced societies: brief, vivid spectacles, revolutionary phantasmagoria flashing across the screen, over before it has scarcely begun, yet memorialized by a flood of posters, books, articles, and television—memorialized but not really experienced, pop revolution for the spectators, instant revolution for the producers, and an art form for the main actors.”¹⁰³ Something that contrasted sharply with Wolin’s own formative experience during the American sixties.¹⁰⁴

Moreover, in the United States, the absence of a fascist past, or of a Communist Party, led to a different configuration of the political field, even if cold war anticommunism, with its unique brand of moralization, was so widespread that it figured prominently in the Port Huron Statement, the radical manifesto summarizing the political vision of the Students for a Democratic Society and articulating a robust sense of political responsibility (a movement that likewise remained at a pronounced distance from labor struggles), whose most attractive legacy was the retrieval and recasting of the democratic ideal of participatory politics, a noble and genuinely democratic aspiration.¹⁰⁵ But this political dimension of the American sixties would eventually be folded into the idiom of the “counterculture” in many ways an attempt to either idealize, decry, or depoliticize it. A counterculture in turn transformed and normalized into forms of revolt defying cultural conventions, mores, and beliefs, but doing so within the parameters of the liberal-capitalist order. “Repressive desublimation,” Herbert Marcuse famously called it.¹⁰⁶ It is in this context that Theory gained traction in academic circles, especially in the humanities.

Undoubtedly, the reception of the different bodies of work associated with Theory in the United States included degrees of misrecognition and distortion. But perhaps the most obvious misrecognition, one widely shared across the political spectrum defining American Kulturkampf, was of the ethical and political content of these ideas. For those on the left, the critical ethos of Theory rendered it immediately subversive of hierarchies and exclusion; for those on the right these subversions were morally reprehensible.¹⁰⁷ But what both positions tacitly shared was the assumption that these ideas were immediately subversive, tout court, especially insofar as they were presumably devoid of any ethical content. Bodies of works that were at best ambivalent, if not downright hostile to Marxism, were taken as a code word for Marxist radicalism. In these battles the legacies of “The Enlightenment” became straw men: the critiques of “master narratives” of historical progress, an ill-defined but vilified humanism, along with the universal “subject,” were couched in explicitly antinormative stances. But the ethical overtones informing some of the initial articulations of these ideas, which, as already shown, gained ascendance as part of the concerted effort to resist the traditional political forms structuring the Fifth Republic in France, either in response to the antitotalitarian moment of the seventies or largely aligned with its broad contours, were initially cast as politically subversive antiethical stances, even when most of the master thinkers conforming the new canonizations of Theory were central figures in the advent and crystallization of the ethical turn in France. The ethical lineaments of Theory remained mostly recessive across the Atlantic, as sediments that lay dormant during the heyday of “the Theoretical era (c. 1968–87).”¹⁰⁸ But 1987 and the cultural wars that ensued soon after became turning points. From then on, Theory would sport a multifaceted ethical politics, including an ethics of reading, in which the conceit of “ethics first” became paramount.¹⁰⁹ This ethicization of political phenomena and questions of collective life had its share of moralization. More to the point, it had an elective affinity with the larger depoliticization and overall moralization of public discourse already underway in the context of Reaganism.

What were the historical, political, and economic determinants of this moment? These are found in the political logics that crystallized in the “long seventies.” The most obvious ideological change was the backlash against the sixties that Nixon’s election, with its appeal to a “silent majority,” epitomized. Politically, the overall succession of defeats for the left in the transatlantic world contributed to a sense of political exhaustion and a need to break away from political legacies that undermine the political system. The “negative ethics” of tolerance invoked by proponents of pluralism in American political science and discourse gained ascendance in the United States as an ethic of exhaustion seeking to preserve the stability of the political and social order.¹¹⁰ So did the restoration of American pride and virtue, something advocated by both the law-abiding patriots who were alienated by the radicalism of the sixties and by the bien pensant establishment of the Democratic Party, which had been lukewarm, if not hostile, to sixties radicalism and its uncompromising rejection of racial inequalities and the critique of imperialism. America needed to stand tall once again, or so the narrative went, a stance that demanded exorcising the specter of Vietnam and the restoration of national assertiveness and confidence.¹¹¹ With Carter’s belated embrace of human rights during the historic crucible of the late seventies, human rights became precious “moral capital” providing a much needed healing narrative and a new lease of normative capital for the American imperium.¹¹² In this crucial historical moment, the domestic negative ethics of tolerance found its international correlate in the negative ethics of human rights.

In a fundamental way, the history of the turn to ethics is inextricably intertwined with the demise of Marxism and the anticommunist political sensibility that crystallized on both North Atlantic shores during the late sixties, which was coeval with the onset of postmodernity as a historical condition, along with neoliberalism and depoliticized politics. In the longer term, the insurrectionary contestation of ’68 was channeled by an ethical turn that it nourished and in which its legacies were transmogrified. In due course, revolutionary fidelity yielded to ethical orientations. Yet there are continuities in the transmogrification of political contestation into an ethos of insurrection: for the antinomian spirit of ’68 always combined political insurrection with a hedonist, moral, and cultural ethos.¹¹³ Its afterlives, however, have proven which pole has had the upper hand. Although intellectual and political developments scarcely move on a par—different levels of a totality, or a structure, seldom do—a common matrix can still be discerned by the foregoing historical-political constellation. If there is one constant in these voyages of theoretical bodies of work and political discourses, it is the strong depoliticizing drive behind them and the drive to dedifferentiate and disavow any dialectical conceptualization or elucidation of the intersection between ethics and politics, or an historical unfolding of the present condition, in both its continuities and discontinuities. At the theoretical level, an antinomian spirit has led to the dedifferentiation and deconceptualization that characterize postmodernity, with the ethical turn and its colonization of other fields of action as a particular symptom. Politically, the defeat of the revolutionary left and liberal ascendance has marked the political field; it is a context of defeat and reaction that best defines the political situation in which this turn has unfolded.