Ethical Subjects in Contemporary Culture

Abstract

This book presents an original perspective on Emmanuel Levinas's account of the ethical Subject as contingently and empirically embedded in everyday experience and situations. It explores the relationship between theoretical understandings of the Subject in recent and contemporary European philosophy and the constitution of ethical subjectivity in relation to ethical ‘subject matters’ as these are lived, as the author argues and demonstrates, in parallel with one another. The first two chapters establish the philosophical basis for the approach to ethical subjectivity the work as a whole adopts, reading Levinas alongside thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Deleuze, Badiou and Nancy. The following chapters discuss a range of ethical subject matters of contemporary concern from the perspective of the production of the ethical subject in the situations of life as praxis and characterised by contractual encounters with others. Through these contextualised discussions an original theory the ethical subject in situ is developed.