Introduction: Displacing the Line between Ethics and Politics

The ways in which the line between ethics and politics is drawn and displaced has emerged through the preceding chapters as of central importance in any attempt to reconceptualise the political implications of a destabilisation of foundational approaches to ethics. Having examined some theoretical resources which enable an interrogation and displacement of the line, this chapter draws out their implications for reconceptualising questions of post-foundational ethics and practical politics through a focus on the assumptions and distinctions that such line drawing relies upon and reproduces.

This particular line between ethics and politics is often mirrored in discussions of the relation between the conditional and unconditional, the singular and plural, the Other and Third, the immanent and transcendent, theory and practice and so on. In turn, these relationships are integral to conceptions of ethics and responsibility and to the possibility of questioning these conceptions. There is a complex support structure surrounding any claims about ethics and politics, and it is through a reassessment of some elements of this structure which otherwise go relatively unexamined that this chapter proceeds to offer a rereading of the possibilities and limitations of poststructuralist ethics and politics.

There are three key areas drawn from the readings of Levinas, Derrida and Nancy in the previous chapters around which my rereading of the ethico-political develops.