An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy - Tapa dura

"An Ethics of Dissensus brings together the work of some of the most influential poststructuralist and postmodernist theorists to develop a link between their models of the fragmented subject and ethics of alterity (that values radical difference) and their implications for the political and ethical inetractions among internally diverse and mobile groups in democratic societies. This book should prove particularly illuminating to literary critics and philosophers who are interested in seeing how postmodern ethics can be transformed to suit the needs of feminist theory and politics." -- Comparative Literature "Ziarek has produced one of the most sensitive, thoughtful, original, and quietly provocative texts I know in the broad areas of contemporary philosophy and sexual and racial politics. . . . Trained in comparative literature and literary studies, she is equally at home in the most difficult and contentious of philosophical texts." -- Elizabeth Grosz, State University of New York * Buffalo * "Original, carefully argued, and beautifully written, this book is one of the first sustained attempts to think through the relationship between feminist ethics and feminist politics. Ziarek's nuanced readings of central figures in current debates in postmodern ethics provide not only new ways of interpreting their work but also new directions for ethical theory." -- Kelly Oliver

Addressing a constellation of diverse thinkers-including Emmanuel Levinas, Patricia Williams, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray-the author proposes a new conception of ethics, an ethics of dissensus that rethinks the relation between freedom and obligation in a double context of embodiment and antagonism. The author employs discourses that have hitherto been segregated: postmodern ethics, feminism, race theory, and the idea of radical democracy.