The Ethics of Resistance:
Tyranny of the Absolute
About The Ethics of Resistance:
Opening a new debate on ethical reasoning after Kant, Drew Dalton addresses the problem of the absolute in ethical and political thought. Attacking the foundation of European philosophical morality, he critiques the idea that in order for ethical judgement to have any real power, it must attempt to discover and affirm some conception of the absolute good. Without rejecting the essential role the absolute plays within ethical reasoning, Dalton interrogates the assumed value of the absolute.
Dalton brings some of the most influential contemporary philosophical traditions into dialogue with each other: speculative realists like Badiou and Meillassoux; phenomenologists, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas; German Idealists, especially Kant and Schelling; psychoanalysts Freud and Lacan; and finally, post-structuralists, specifically Foucault, Deleuze, and Ranciere. The relevance of these thinkers to concrete socio-political problems is shown through reflections on the Holocaust, suicide bombings, the rise of neo-liberalism and neo-nationalism, as well as rampant consumerism and racism.
This book re-defines ethical reasoning as that which refuses absolutes and resists what Milton's devil in Paradise Lost called the “tyranny of heaven.” Against traditional ethical reasoning, Dalton sees evil not as a moral failure, but as the result of an all too easy assent to the absolute; an assent which can only be countered through active resistance. For Dalton, resistance to the absolute is the sole channel through which the good can be defined.
Reviews:
“Through a sharp reading of the ethics foregrounding most contemporary western thought and philosophy's relationship with the absolute, Dalton finds the point where ethical thought falls into nihilism or, even worse, outright fascism. Dalton goes on to outline an “ethics of resistance” that pulls away from the tyranny of the absolute.” – Dylan Trigg, FWF Lise Meitner Senior Fellow, Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Austria.
“Dalton does a great job of writing clearly about very difficult philosophers. This is an important book for anyone interested in the source of fanaticism.” – Paul Cliteur, Professor of Jurisprudence, Leiden University, The Netherlands.
“A radical re-reading of evil in relation to ethics, which carries with it a powerful argument against the seduction of the absolute; the writing style is forceful and animated without being hyperbolic. This is an original contribution to the field of contemporary continental philosophy.” – William Watkin, Professor of Contemporary Philosophy and Literature, Brunel University, UK.
“Dalton's bold proposal in this book is that our moral shortcomings--evil itself, to be sure--do not result from the lack of a moral absolute, but precisely from any uncritical allegiance to the absolute. But this is not yet another book that dismisses the absolute as old-fashioned or ineffectual. Siding neither with nihilism, skepticism, nor relativism, it champions resistance to ethical dogmatism as the only ethical means of negotiating with the all-too-real force that the absolute exerts on us as ethical subjects. It is both diagnostic and prescriptive, and it is finely argued, indeed.” - Tom Sparrow, Professor of Philosophy, Slippery Rock University.
Table of Contents:
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION: The Failure of Ethics in the West
A History of Collaboration
Ethics Reenvisioned
PART ONE: THE TYRANNY OF THE ABSOLUTE
1 - The Trouble with Post-Kantian Ethics: Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux on the Vicissitudes of Ethical Absolutes
The Ironic Antinomies of Post-Kantian Ethical and Political Thought
The Limits of Liberalism
The Dogmatic Structure of Nationalism
Alain Badiou and the “Smug Nihilism” of Post-Kantian Ethics
The Ethics of Fidelity
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
2 - Phenomenology, Ethics, and the Other: Rediscovering the Possibility of Ethical Absolutes with Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas
Phenomenology’s Problem
Edmund Husserl’s Reduction
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
Shame and 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 Absolute and the Infinite
Levinas’s God?
The Ethical Value of Levinas’s Absolute
The Ambiguity of the Infinite
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
The Evil of Acquiescence
Kierkegaard’s Apologetics for Murder
A Report on the Banality of Evil Revisited
The Tyranny of Heaven
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
Unconsciousness Unsettled
The Alterity of the Other
Desire for the Other
The Subversion of the Subject
The Other / Thing
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
5 - Carving a Space of Freedom: Michel Foucault and the Ethics of Resistance Michel Foucault and the Exigency of Ethical Resistance
The Uses of Genealogy
The Modern Subject – Governmentality, Normalization, and Bio-power
The Trouble with Modern Subjectivity and the Ethics of Resistance
Ethics as Care for the Self
Technologies of Care
Care for the Self in Relation to the Absolute Other
CONCLUSION - The Ethics of Resistance: A Backward-Turning Relation
Ethics and the Absolute
A Backward-Turning Relation
Politics as First Philosophy
The Political Ends of Anarchy
The Ethics of Ab-archy