Nomadic ethics involves effortful, ongoing encounters with unknownable others. It entails a rejection of normative thinking and a commitment to open-ended ways of being and becoming. It rests on a view of the subject as a genealogical, ecological, embodied entity. A nomadic stance counters domination, exclusion, violence, and the denial of difference. The writers I have examined demonstrate both the impediments to and the urgency of ethical nomadism.

Vanderbeke shows how subjects are interpellated by superficial dominant discourses and become self-serving and unthinking, and how the media and advertising conspire to produce fragmented, dissatisfied societies. In Das Muschelessen, she exposes the heterosexual family as an unequal arrangement, and masculinist thought as rigid and imprisoning. Her oeuvre characterizes radical politics as self-indulgent, faddish sloganeering. Nevertheless, in works such as Geld oder Leben, Vanderbeke also develops an anticapitalist position, and in Frau Choi, a transnational feminism. Vanderbeke engages in mocking mimicry to undermine dominant discourses. Her style involves teasing patterns of assertion and withdrawal. It discourages set, easy assumptions, prodding one to shift one's thinking, to qualify or even overturn it.

Grünzweig's reflections on the horror of the German past, on homogenizing globalization, and on the arrogance of humans toward animals and nonhuman nature, constitute an economadic challenge to exploitation and abuse. The poems' understanding of identity as precarious, relational, and familial also reveals an anti-individualistic conception of the self. Poetry, with its density and suppleness, is arguably the place at which one can best pose such challenges. In Grünzweig, the language is alert and strange.