An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (review)

Abstract

THE COMPAKATIST EWA PLONOWSKA ZIAREK. An Ethics ofDissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, andthe Politics ofRadicalDemocracy. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. ix + 288 pp. Building upon the recent "tum" to ethics in postmodem, postcolonial, and feminist studies (Zygmund Bauman's Postmodern Ethics, Moira Gatens's Feminist Ethics, Rosalyn Diprose's The Bodies ofWomen: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference , and Rey Chow's Ethics AfterIdealism come to mind), Ziarek seeks an original synthesis among these various perspectives, allowing them to meet on the terrain ofdialogic contest. What results is an ethics of"dissensus" that interplays and supplements its perspectives, emphasizing creative tension as much as negotiation. The purpose ofthis dialogic reconstruction is manifestly pragmatic-political. While subscribing to the postmodem critique ofthe absolute concepts offreedom and responsibility , Ziarek insists that this critique should not "foreclose ethics but, on the contrary, renew it and intensify its political significance" (3). In order to be effective, the ethics of"dissensus" must redefine freedom in relational terms, as an "engagement in a transformative praxis motivated by the obligation for the Other" (2). It must also recognize that the agents involved in the political arena are concrete, "embodied subjects" (3). Feminism can help here in crucial ways, challenging the "disembodied character ofethical subjectivity" in traditional theories ofdemocracy and stressing the responsibility that citizens have in the "democratic struggles against racist and sexist oppression" (2, 3). Against an abstract-normative morality that reduces ethical encounters to the "apolitical experience ofgood and evil" (2), Ziarek posits an embodied, polemical ethics that connects the "realm of the body, race, and sexuality" with the "realm of ihepolemos understood both as the discursive operation ofpower and the libidinal economy ofthe drive" (4). At its best and most complete, Ziarek's radicalized feminist ethics occupies the space "between obligation for the Other and the agency ofthe subject, between responsibility and the struggles against sexist, racist, and class oppression, and finally, between the desire forjustice and embodiment, affect, and sexuality" (6). This is no middle ground but rather a terrain ofcontinuous contest and negotiation. Particularly captivating is how this feminist ethics ofdissensus interplays an "ethos of becoming" with an "ethos ofobligation" (6). In Ziarek's view, the feminist ethics ofdissensus must balance the emphasis on unchecked freedom, diversity, and difference in the "heteromorphism" ofNietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze, with the obligation to the Other in the "heteronomy" ofLévinas, Derrida, and Lyotard (7). The "ethos ofbecoming" is important to feminist theory both as a "new basis ofresistance " (33) and as an "experimental praxis emphasizing the creation ofnew forms oflife" (33) and "new mode[s] ofrelating to oneself (36). But to provide a genuine basis for democratic straggles, the ethos ofbecoming must intersect with an ethos ofalterity that emphasizes obligation to the Other (47). The dialogue between the two allows the articulation ofa "performative politics" (80) that negotiates the obligation to an Other in the framework ofthe "antagonisms constitutive oflanguage and social identities" (73), as well as ofpassion, sexuality, race, and rights (80). Ziarek's "performative" ethics/politics comes together slowly, in patient forays through a range ofrelevant non-feminist and feministperspectives that are reread critically and played against one another. Ziarek's articulation goes through two basic phases: the first three chapters identify and clarify the postmodem basis for a feminist theory ofdissensus. The encounter of feminism with Foucault's heteroVcH . 27 (2003): 175 REVIEWS morphism, Levinas's heteronomy, and Lyotard's agonistic politics provides the former with "an alternative to both the indifferent struggle ofheterogeneous forces, [. . .] and to the Utopian vision ofjustice transcending the antagonism ofrace, class, sexuality, and gender" (117). Once the relationship betweenpotemos and obligation is fine-tuned in meticulous rereadings of Foucault, Lévinas, and Lyotard, Ziarek outlines an "embodied" feminist ethics, including in it—via Kristeva's psychoanalysis —a libidinal economy ofdrives and a violence (a "negative^'oMmawce") manifested both internally (in the "subject's conflicting relation to 'the Other within'" [117]) and externally, towards an Other perceived as dangerous and therefore expulsed from the social body (120, 126). Ziarek expands further her proposed ethics of dissensus through Luce Irigaray's "camal ethics of sexual difference" (11), which is rehistoricized to include an awareness ofdifferences among women subjects (152), and through bell hooks...