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Since Greek tragedy and philosophy, ethics has—more or less successfully—served as a bulwark against contingency; or at least to provide guidance in cases were decisions had to be taken in the face of the undecidable. The essays collected here tackle this problem against the background of an Enlightenment that has made the overcoming of contingency its raison d’être. However, contingency’s hardnosed existence subverts this success story. And it seems that Hegel’s dialectics—whose main goal it is to eliminate it—forms something like a last line of defence against it. Ranging from topics like community, environmental ethics, and agency to the goals of critical philosophy, the renowned scholars assembled in this volume show that it might be time to leave Hegel’s cosmological concept of reason behind.

This volume addresses a timely and challenging subject for contemporary philosophy: the ethical responsibility of opening borders, psychic and physical, to the stranger. Drawing on key critical debates on the question of hospitality ranging from phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction to neo-Kantian moral critique and Anglo-American virtue ethics, the book engages with urgent moral conversations regarding the role of identity, nationality, immigration, peace, and justice. The volume is divided into two parts. In the first part, entitled “Four Faces of Hospitality: Linguistic, Narrative, Confessional, Carnal,” Richard Kearney develops his recent research on the philosophy of hospitality, which informs the international Guestbook Project of which he is a founder and director (guestbookproject.org). This part elaborates an ethics of hosting the stranger. In the second part, entitled “Hospitality and Moral Psychology: Exploring the Border between Theory and Practice,” Melissa Fitzpatrick adumbrates a new ethics of hospitality in a robust reengagement with the philosophies of Kant, Levinas, Arendt, and contemporary virtue ethicist Talbot Brewer. In the concluding chapters, Kearney and Fitzpatrick chart novel options for the pedagogical application of an ethics of hospitality to our contemporary world of border anxiety, boundary disputes, migration crisis, and the looming ecological challenge.

This book details our implication in violence we do not directly inflict but in which we are structurally complicit: famines, civil wars, political repression in far-away places, and war, as it's classically understood. It insists on a bond between ethics and politics and attributes violence to our treatment of the two as separate spheres. We repeatedly resist the call to responsibility, as expressed by the appeal—by peoples across the world—for the care and attention that their vulnerability enjoins. But the book argues that this resistance is not ineluctable, and it searches for ways that enable us to mitigate it, through rebellion, kindness, irony, critique, and shame. In the process, it engages with a range of writers, from Camus, Sartre, and Freud, to Stefan Zweig and Karl Kraus, to Kenzaburō Ōe, Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler. The resulting exchange between philosophy and literature enables the book to delineate the contours of a possible/impossible ethicosmopolitics—an ethicosmopolitics to come. Pushing against the limits of liberal rationalism, the book calls for a more radical understanding of interpersonal responsibility. Not just a work of philosophy but an engagement with life as it's lived, the book works to redefine our global obligations, articulating anew what humanitarianism demands and what an ethically grounded political resistance might mean.

Decreation and the Ethical Bind identifies a decreative ethics, whereby self-dispossession underwrites an ethical obligation to preserve the other from harm. The author shows how obligation emerges at the conjuncture of competing claims: between the other’s subject affirmation and one’s own dislocation, between what one has and what one has to give, between a demand that asks for too much and the extraordinary demand of asking nothing. In the unfolding and reiteration of themes issuing from the other’s claim upon oneself develops a complex picture of the tensions that sustain the scene of ethical relationality. Just how these tensions both subtend and undercut an other-centered ethics of preservation is the question this book tarries with. By proposing a way to read the distinct ethical charge of the other’s claim not to be harmed, Decreation and the Ethical Bind offers a novel treatment of the concept of decreation in the thought of Simone Weil, putting her work in dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot and Judith Butler. In examining themes of ethical obligation, vulnerability and the force of weak speech, the present study places Weil within a continental tradition of literary theory in which writing and speech are bound up with questions of ethical appeal. It contributes a new and critical voice to the current conversation in theory and criticism that addresses a difficult form of ethics that isn’t grounded in subjective agency and narrative fruition, but in the risks taken to fulfill the claims it makes.

Can we truly claim that metaphysics is over? That we are living, as the post-phenomenological trend claims, in the epoch of the “end of metaphysics”? Through a close reading of Levinas’s masterpiece, Totality and Infinity, Raoul Moati tries to show that things are in fact much more complicated. Contrary to a certain common understanding of Levinas’s work, Totality and Infinity proposes not so much an alternative to Heidegger’s ontology, but a deeper elucidation of the meaning of “Being,” beyond Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. For this reason, the metaphor of the night becomes crucial to the exploration of a nocturnal face of the events of Being, beyond their ontological reduction to the understanding of Being. The deployment of being beyond its intentional or ontological reduction coincides with what Levinas calls “nocturnal events.” Insofar as the light of understanding hides them, it is only through the de-formalization of the traditional phenomenological approach of phenomena, that Levinas, Moati shows, leads us to their exploration and their systematic and mutual implications. Moati then elaborates, following Levinas, the possibility of what he calls a “metaphysics of society,” which cannot, in any way, be integrated into the deconstructive grasp of the so-called “metaphysics of presence.” In that sense, Moati’s philosophical inquiry constitutes an impressive meditation on the meaning and the possibility of a revival of metaphysics after the epoch of the “end of metaphysics.”

Throughout his writing career Nietzsche advocates the affirmation of earthly life as a way to counteract nihilism and asceticism. This volume takes stock of the complexities and wide-ranging perspectives that Nietzsche brings to bear on the problem of life’s becoming on earth by engaging various interpretative paradigms reaching from existentialist to Darwinist readings of Nietzsche. In an age in which the biological sciences claim to have unlocked the deepest secrets and codes of life, the essays in this volume propose a more skeptical view. Life is both what is closest and what is furthest from us, because life experiments through us as much as we experiment with it, because life keeps our thinking and our habits always moving, in a state of recurring nomadism. Nietzsche’s philosophy is perhaps the clearest expression of the antinomy contained in the idea of “studying” life and in the Socratic ideal of an “examined” life, and remains a deep source of wisdom about living.

Debates over cloning and genetic engineering often revolve around the question of sovereignty and who has the right to choose. Debates over capital punishment revolve around questions of the sovereignty of the state to decide who lives and who dies. In this book, I complicate these discussions by introducing Jacques Derrida's challenges to the liberal conception of sovereignty. Developing, extending, and applying his critique, I reframe debates over life and death, from cloning to capital punishment, in the hopes of opening an alternative path through the thickets of these controversies. Combining deconstruction with psychoanalysis, I attempt to delineate the concepts of sovereignty, freedom, choice, nature, and culture as they come to play in debates over reproducing life and death, from cloning to capital punishment. Deconstruction with a psychoanalytic supplement can assist us in moving through the dense undergrowth of ethical problems and political dilemmas surrounding technologies of life and death.

This work examines and compares the role of a sense of justice in the ethical and political thought of Confucius (Kongzi) and John Rawls, and presents an argument concerning why comparative studies are worthwhile. Several scholars of Confucianism have suggested that there are such stark differences between the structure and content of the work of modern liberal philosophers like Rawls and the work of classical Confucian philosophers that it is reasonable to doubt that there is any value in trying to compare them. Against these claims, this book argues that the central concerns of the Analects (the most influential record of Confucius’ thought) and Rawls's work intersect in their emphasis on the importance of developing a sense of justice, and that despite deep and important differences between their two accounts of a sense of justice, these views on the relationship between moral psychology and political philosophy a source of significant philosophical agreement. This study also offers a larger argument concerning the reasons why comparative work is worthwhile, the distinctive challenges comparative studies face and approaches to resolving those difficulties, and how comparative work can accomplish distinctive and significant ends—which is a necessity for and sheds light upon the central argument of the book. This work argues that a comparative study of the capacity for a sense of justice in Confucius and Rawls can not only help us to better understand each of their views, but also helps us to see new ways to apply their insights, especially with respect to the contemporary relevance of their accounts.

This book brings the powerful insights of Continental philosophy to bear on some of the most challenging difficulties of ethical life. Currently philosophy is being radically transformed by questions of how to live well. What does such a way of life mean? How are we to understand the meaning of ethicality? What are the obstacles to ethical living? And should we assume that an ethical life is a “better” life? The movement of history and the developments of culture and knowledge seem to have outstripped the capacity of traditional forms of reflection upon ethical life to understand how we might answer these questions. Ranging from existentialism to deconstruction, phenomenology to psychoanalytic theory, and hermeneutics to post-structuralism, the twelve essays in this volume take up a wide but clearly connected set of issues relevant to living ethically: race, responsibility, religion, terror, torture, technology, deception, and even the very possibility of an ethical life. Some of the questions addressed are specific to our times; others are ancient questions but with quite contemporary twists. In each case, they concern the philosophical significance of ongoing historical, cultural, and political transformations for ethical living and thinking.

Moral philosophy and poststructuralism have long been considered two antithetical enterprises. Moral philosophy is invested in securing norms, whereas poststructuralism attempts to unclench the grip of norms on our lives. Moreover, poststructuralism is often suspected of undoing the possibility of ethical knowledge by emphasizing the unstable, socially constructed nature of our practices and knowledge. This book argues that Judith Butler's work makes possible a productive encounter between moral philosophy and poststructuralism, rethinking responsibility and critique as key concepts at the juncture of ethics and politics. Putting into conversation Butler's earlier and most recent work, this book begins by examining how Butler's critique of the subject as nontransparent to itself, formed thoroughly through relations of power and in subjection to norms and social practices, poses a challenge to ethics and ethical agency. The book argues, in conversation with Butler, Levinas, and Laplanche, that responsibility becomes possible only when we do not know what to do or how to respond, yet find ourselves under a demand to respond, and even more, to respond well to others. Drawing on the work of Butler, Adorno, and Foucault, the book examines critique as a central practice for moral philosophy. It interrogates the limits of moral and political knowledge and probes methods of social criticism to uncover and oppose injustices.