Ethics Politics Subjectivity

In Ethics–Politics–Subjectivity, Simon Critchley takes up three questions at the centre of contemporary theoretical debate: What is ethical experience? What can be said of the subject who has this experience? What, if any, is the relation of ethical experience to politics? These questions are approached by way of a critical confrontation with a number of major thinkers, including Lacan, Genet, Blanchot, Nancy, Rorty and, in particular, Levinas and Derrida. Critchley offers a critical reconstruction of Levinas's notion of ethical experience and, questioning the religious pietism and political conservatism of the dominant interpretation of Levinas's work, develops an ethics of finitude which, far from being tragic, opens on to an experience of humour and the comic. Using this reading of Levinas as a way of unlocking the rich ethical potential of Derrida's work, Critchley outlines and defends the political possibilities of deconstruction. On the basis of Derrida's recent work, Critchley attempts to rethink notions of friendship, democracy, economics and technology.

In Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity, Simon Critchley takes up three questions at the centre of contemporary theoretical debate: What is ethical experience? What can be said of the subject who has this experience? What, if any, is the relation of ethical experience to politics? Through spirited confrontations with major thinkers, such as Lacan, Nancy, Rorty, and, in particular, Levinas and Derrida, Critchley finds answers in a nuanced "ethics of finitude" and defends the political possibilities of deconstruction. Democracy, economics, friendship, and technology are all considered anew in Critchley's bold excursions on the meaning and value of recent French philosophy.

An ethical reappraisal of postmodern and poststructuralist theory, including works by Levinas, Foucault, Derrida, Jameson, Zizek, and Butler.

This book explores the hopeful possibility that emerging geographies of postsecularity are able to contribute significantly to the understanding of how common life may be shared, and how caring for the common goods of social justice, well-being, equality, solidarity and respect for difference may be imagined and practiced. Drawing on recent geographic theory to recalibrate ideas of the postsecular public sphere, the authors develop the case for postsecularity as a condition of being that is characterised by practices of receptive generosity, rapprochement between religious and secular ethics, and a hopeful re-enchantment and re-shaping of desire towards common life. The authors highlight the contested formation of ethical subjectivity under neoliberalism and the emergence of postsecularity within this process as an ethically-attuned politics which changes relations between religion and secularity and animates novel, hopeful imaginations, subjectivities, and praxes as alternatives to neoliberal norms. The spaces and subjectivities of emergent postsecularity are examined through a series of innovative case studies, including food banks, drug and alcohol treatment, refugee humanitarian activism in Calais, homeless participatory art projects, community responses to the Christchurch earthquakes in New Zealand, amongst others. The book also traces the global conditions for postsecularity beyond the Western and predominantly Christian-secular nexus of engagement. This is a valuable resource for students in several academic disciplines, including geography, sociology, politics, religious studies, international development and anthropology. It will be of great interest to secular and faith-based practitioners working in religion, spirituality, politics or more widely in public policy, urban planning and community development.

The Subject and Other Subjects theorizes the differences among ethical, aesthetic, and political conceptions of identity. When a person is called beautiful, why does it strike us as an objectification? Is a person whom we consider to be an exemplary person still a person, and not an example? Can one person conceive what it means to have the perspective of a community? This study treats these thorny issues in the context of recent debates in cultural studies, feminism, literary criticism, narrative theory, and moral philosophy concerning the nature and directions of multiculturalism, post-modernity, and sexual politics. Tobin Siebers raises a series of questions that "cross the wires" among ethical, aesthetic, and political definitions of the self, at once exposing our basic assumptions about these definitions and beginning the work of reconceiving them. The Subject and Other Subjects will broaden our ideas about the strange interplay between subjects and objects (and other subjects!) that characterizes modern identity, and so provoke lively debate among anthropologists, art historians, literary theorists, philosophers, and others concerned with how the question of the subject becomes entangled with ethics, aesthetics, and politics. As Siebers argues, the subject is in fact a tangled network of subjectivities, a matrix of identities inconceivable outside of symbols and stories. Tobin Siebers is Professor of English at the University of Michigan, and author of Cold War Criticism and the Politics of Skepticism; Morals and Stories; The Ethics of Criticism; The Romantic Fantastic; and The Mirror of Medusa.

Guided by the contention that different conceptions of the political are committed to specific conceptions of subjectivity while different conceptions of subjectivity have different political implications, the essays in this collection explore these notions and their connection.

Levinas (1969) claims that "morality is not a branch of philosophy, but first philosophy" and if he is right about this, might ethics also serve as a first psychology? This possibility is explored by the authors in this volume who seek to bring the "ethical turn" into the world of psychoanalysis. This phenomenologically rich and socially conscious ethics has taken centre stage in a variety of academic disciplines, inspired by the work of philosophers and theologians concerned with the moral fabric of subjectivity, human relationship, and socio-political life. At the heart of this movement is a reconsideration of the other person, and the dangers created when the question of the "Other" is subsumed by grander themes. The authors showcased here represent the exceptional work being done by both scholars and practitioners working at the crossroads between psychology and philosophy in order to rethink the foundations of their disciplines. The Ethical Turn: Otherness and subjectivity in contemporary psychoanalysis guides readers into the heart of this fresh and exciting movement and includes contributions from many leading thinkers, who provide fascinating new avenues for enriching our responses to suffering and understandings of human identity. It will be of use to psychoanalysts, professionals in psychology, postgraduate students, professors and other academics in the field.

This book is a detailed examination of post-Marxist political theory, focusing especially on the work of Laclau, Habermas and Derrida. This book will make useful reading for students of Politics and Political Theory.