Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Page 2"Ethical questions dominate today's political and academic agendas. While government think-tanks ponder the dilemmas of bio-ethics, medical ethics and professional ethics, respect for human rights and reverence for the Other have become matters of virtually instinctive consensus." "Alain Badiou, one of the most powerful and unusual voices in contemporary French philosophy, explodes the facile assumptions behind this recent ethical turn. He shows how our prevailing ethical principles serve to reinforce an ideology of the status quo and demonstrates that an ethics conceived in terms of negative human rights or tolerance of difference cannot sustain decisive and precisely situated interventions any more than they can underpin a coherent concept of evil. Our consensual ethical norms amount to nothing more than a jumbled confusion of legalistic formalism, scandalised opinion, and theological mystification."--Jacket. |
Contents
Translators Introduction | vii |
Notes on the Translation | xlix |
Introduction | 1 |
Does the Other Exist? | 18 |
Ethics as a Figure of Nihilism | 30 |
The Ethic of Truths | 40 |
The Problem of Evil | 58 |
Conclusion | 90 |
| 145 | |
| 163 | |
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Common terms and phrases
absolute affirmation Alain Badiou Altogether-Other anti-philosophical bio-ethics break conception concerns consensus consistency counted cultural death decision Derrida differences Donner la mort Ecole Normale Supérieure element Emmanuel Lévinas engagement essential ethic of truths ethical ideology event example existence extermination fact fidelity figure French Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak genuine Hannah Arendt human animal human rights idea identify identity Immanuel Kant immigrants Immortal infinite interest Jacques Derrida Jacques Lacan Kant knowledge L'Etre et l'événement Lacan Lacanian language Lévinas logic Luce Irigaray mathematical matter means militant moral multiple-being Nazism not-known ontology opinions Paris particular perseverance philosophy political sequence possible precisely prescription principle psychoanalysis pure multiplicity question radical Evil reality relation Revolution Saint Paul Séminaire sense simply simulacrum singular situation Slavoj Žižek social some-one Spivak subject of truth subject-language theory things thought tion transcendent truth-procedures truth-process universal unnameable Varlam Shalamov void workers