Ethics After Poststructuralism: A Critical Reader(Ethics and Culture)

The present era of economic devastation, legacies of colonization and imperialism, climate change and habitat loss, calls for a new understanding of ethics. These essays on otherness, responsibility and hospitality raise urgent questions. Contributors range from the prominent--including Levinas, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben--to recent theorists such as Judith Butler, Enrique Dussell and Rosi Braidotti. The essays emphasize the always vulnerable status of a radically different Other, even as they question what responsibility to that Other might mean.

Table of Contents:
Table of Contents Acknowledgments Introduction (Lee Olsen and Brendan Johnston) Section 1: Hospitality and Responsibility for the Other Responsibility for the Other (Emmanuel Levinas) From “Hospitality, Justice, and Responsibility: A Dialogue” (Jacques Derrida) Precarious Life (Judith Butler) Is Autonomy Unethical? Trauma and the Politics of Responsibility (Mari Ruti ) Feminist Reflections on Vulnerability: Disrespect, Obligation, Action (Ewa Plonowska Ziarek) Section 2: States of Exception From “Right of Death and Power over Life” (Michel Foucault) Introduction to Homo Sacer Giorgio Agamben Liberal Multiculturalism and the Ethics of Hospitality in the Age of Globalization (Meyda Yegenoglu) Section 3: Decoloniality and Ethics “Sensibility” and “Otherness” in Emmanuel Levinas (Enrique Dussel) From “Globalization, Organization, and the Ethics of Liberation” (Enrique Dussel with Eduardo ­Ibarra-Colado) On Pluritopic Hermeneutics, ­Trans-modern Thinking, and Decolonial Philosophy (Madina V. Tlostanova and Walter D. Mignolo) From “Levinas’s Hegemonic Identity Politics, Radical Philosophy, and the Unfinished Project of Decolonization” (Nelson ­Maldonado-Torres) Section 4: Posthuman Ethics From “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” (Jacques Derrida) From “Posthuman Ethics and the Becoming Animal of Emmanuel Levinas” (Mary Bunch) From “Articulating Ecological Ethics and Politics” (Mick Smith) Affirmation versus Vulnerability: On Contemporary ­Ethical Debates (Rosi Braidotti) Index

About the Author :
Lee Olsen lectures at the University of Nevada, Reno. His work focuses on post-1950s North American literature, political economics, and trauma theory. Brendan Johnston lectures at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research focuses on 20th Century American literature, modernist poetry, and materialist theory. Ann Keniston is a professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Review :
“In Ethics after Poststructuralism, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, and other prominent thinkers reflect upon the most urgent ethical questions in continental philosophy, after Heidegger. The editors have done an impressive job of assembling and juxtaposing key texts in order to generate further dialogue and debate. This book offers a readable introduction to poststructural theory. It would also work in the seminar setting.”—Christopher Wise, Western Washington University “Ethics after Poststructuralism offers an impressive portrait of the richness of Levinas’s philosophy for thinking about the most important and challenging ethical issues of our time, including multiculturalism, liberalism, feminism, state authority, immigration, decolonialism, posthumanism, and ecology. Ethics after Poststructuralism stands among the most exciting invitations to become ethical, in a Levinasian sense, that I have read. It is destined to become a classic.”—Raoul Moati, The University of Chicago, author of Levinas and the Night of Being.