In the Introduction, I argued that the ways in which we experience ‘everyday’ ethics as limited, fragmented and exceeding theory pointed to a problem with approaching ethics as a task of theory and application. In response to the specific ways in which this problem is manifest in poststructuralist approaches to Politics and IR, I have suggested that this approach is closely linked to the problem of foundations and that by putting ethical foundations into question, both ethics and politics are refigured as practices emerging at the limits of theory.

This makes the formulation of a ‘more responsible politics’, a task undertaken by the authors considered in Chapter 1, difficult if not impossible. In particular, if ethics and politics cannot be separated in the first place, then deducing one from the other becomes deeply problematic. In fact, I have argued, the force of such an attempt distorts and limits readings of key poststructuralist thinkers in such a way that the radical potential of their reformulation of the ethico-political in terms of response and relation is unrealised. The theoretical point of departure for my project, then, has been to develop a reading of these thinkers where such an attempt is resisted. Once the opposition between ethics and politics is displaced, a series of other oppositions onto which this maps are also opened up for interrogation: same/Other, conditional/unconditional, face/Third, transcendence/immanence, universal/particular and singular/plural. The approach I have taken has been to trace the ways in which these oppositions are disrupted in the work of Levinas, Derrida and Nancy.