- Title
- Towards unethical insurgency
- Creator
- Boer, Roland
- Relation
- Rethinking Marxism Vol. 25, Issue 1, p. 38-51
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2013.741268
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- This article is an exercise in the hermeneutics of suspicion-against ethics as propounded by some on the Left. It focuses on the deployment of ethics as a means for relating responsibly to the other, dealing initially with the problematic proposals of Terry Eagleton and Judith Butler. More promising are Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, who question this concern with the other. I go further, exploring how the other is constructed and arguing that ethics produces the other through its own discourse, concealing both its relations with alternative discursive productions of alterity and its socioeconomic connections. Moreover, ethics has good reason to conceal its socioeconomic connections, which are persistently of the ruling class. These connections emerge by investigating the etymological minefield of ethikos, ethos and mos, via Aristotle. With the senses of custom, habit, and accepted social norms, ethics emerges as a ruling class ideology, which leads to the final question: can ethics as a ruling class term be appropriated and filled with different content, or are other terms needed, such as unethical and unmoral?
- Subject
- ethics; class; the other; Eagelton; Butler; Badiou; Zizek
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1059447
- Identifier
- uon:16607
- Identifier
- ISSN:0893-5696
- Language
- eng
- Reviewed
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