Contents
Introduction The failure of ethics in the West
PART ONE The tyranny of the absolute
The ironic antinomies of post-Kantian ethical and political thought
The dogmatic structure of nationalism
Alain Badiou and the “smug nihilism” of post-Kantian ethics
Quentin Meillassoux on the rise of post-critical fanaticism
Factial speculation and radical contingency
The fragility of Meillassoux’s hope
The trouble with speculative ethics
The radical foundations of the phenomenological revolution
Emmanuel Levinas and the possibility of phenomenological ethics
Martin Heidegger and primal ontology
Levinas and the ethical primacy of the Other
Responsibility and ethical subjectivity
Phenomenology and the absolute
3 The problem of the Other: Levinas and Schelling on the reversibility of ethical demand
The face of the Other as absolute phenomena
The ethical value of Levinas’s absolute
Schelling and the absolute reality of good and evil
The reversibility of good and evil in the absolute
The Other as absolute ground for good and evil
Interlude Sympathy for the devil: The tyranny of heaven
Kierkegaard’s apologetics for murder
A report on the banality of evil revisited
PART TWO The ethics of resistance
4 Don’t give up, don’t give in! Jacques Lacan and the ethics of psychoanalysis
The radical power of Lacan’s thought
5 Carving a space of freedom: Michel Foucault and the ethics of resistance
Michel Foucault and the exigency of ethical resistance
The modern subject—Governmentality, normalization, and bio-power
The trouble with modern subjectivity and the ethics of resistance
Care for the self in relation to the absolute Other
Conclusion The ethics of resistance: A backward-turning relation