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This edited volume explores Judith Butler’s work on ethics. It focuses on questions such as whether there has been an ‘ethical turn’ in her work or whether Butler’s increasing emphasis on ethics is merely the culmination of ideas inherent in her earlier writing. Precisely what kind of debt does Butler owe Levinas? What role does affect play in her most recent writings? How do ethics, politics, and affect connect to her increasing concern with violence, war, and conflict? What relation does Butler envisage between grievability and sensate democracy? How do her discussions of ethico-politics relate to her earlier understanding of politics as subversion? What is the nature of the relation between ethics and politics in her recent thinking?

This book theorises shifts in and across critical approaches to capitalism, science, technology, psychoanalysis, literature, and cinema and media studies. Analysing a wide range of novels and films, the book brings renewed Marxian readings to cyberpunk texts previously theorised by Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard, and places them at the heart of the emergence of biopunk and its relation to biocapitalism by mapping their generic, technoscientific, libidinal, and economic exchanges. Biocapitalism is the frontline of capitalism today that promises to enrich and prolong our lives and threatens to extend capitalism's capacity to command our hearts and minds. Biopunk is the literature and film of this new space.

Concepts such as ethics, values and normativity play a crucial — if subtle and easily overlooked — role in Deleuze's overall philosophical project. The chapters in this collection uncover and explore the ethical dimension of Deleuzian philosophy along diverse trajectories and, in so doing, endeavour to reclaim that philosophy as moral philosophy.

This book analyses Derrida’s investigating, and unpicking, of the assertion of a gulf between man and the animal, and the attribution of qualities (both relatively desirable such as reason, and undesirable such as cruelty) to man alone. The contentious term ‘man’ (which may or may not include women) and ‘animal’ (which belies the heterogeneity of animals) are used to highlight the power play in the texts in question. The major source is Derrida’s late seminars, The Beast and the Sovereign, and especially the tracking of the wolf in this work, but there are a range of other important references across his oeuvre. This defining of man against animal has a critical relationship not only to the killing and mistreatment of animals, but also to the relationship between those considered as truly men and subaltern human beings. Two of the examples analysed are taken from the Enlightenment Americas: savages and slaves. This context is particularly important both for the philosophers and poets Derrida focuses on in the first year of the seminars, and also for Robinson Crusoe, one of his main intertexts in the second year. The third, and essential, supplement to bring to Derrida’s writing on (the) animal(s) is the question of sexual difference and of women writers – including Cixous, an intertext he evokes, and then more unexpectedly: Carter, Darriuessecq, Le Doeuff, Duffy, Haraway, Hearne, Ndiaye, Tsvetaeva, Vivien, and many more. The dialogue with feminism is both implicit and significant, invited by Derrida’s own phrasing.

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.

In this book, some distinctive approaches to the ethics of armed conflict are interwoven: (1) A revisionist approach that involves generalising traditional just war principles, so that they are applicable by all sorts of responsible agents to all forms of armed conflict. Such principles should be applicable not only to large-scale military operations (e.g., the 2003 invasion of Iraq) but also to small-scale military actions (e.g., the use of air power to enforce no-fly zones). (2) A cosmopolitan approach that features the Security Council. (3) A preventive approach that emphasises alternatives to armed force, including negotiation and mediation, nonviolent action, and peacekeeping missions. (4) A temporalist approach that prioritises the application of just war principles prospectively to present and future armed conflicts. (5) A coherentist approach that interrelates just war principles, general moral principles (e.g., distributive justice) and real-world cases (e.g., the Rwandan genocide). (6) A human rights approach that encompasses not only armed humanitarian intervention but also armed invasion, armed revolution, and all other forms of armed conflict. The book includes extensive discussions of generalised principles of just cause, last resort, proportionality, and noncombatant immunity. An assortment of other topics are considered, including moral dilemmas of armed conflict, standards of evidence for moral judgements, legitimate authority, the goal of peace, deterrence, escalation, intelligence, terrorism and counterterrorism, targeted airstrikes, and peace agreements. Recent real-world cases are utilised as illustrations, for example, the cases of Afghanistan, Darfur, the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, Libya, and South Sudan.

While Western moral, philosophical, and theological thought has historically privileged the good, this has been accompanied by profound, if subterranean, interest in evil. This book charts a history of evil as it has been thought within this tradition. Showing that the problem of evil, as a conceptual problem—that is, as a problem to be dealt with through rational means—came to the fore with the rise of monotheism, this book initially outlines the dynamics that led to it becoming the problem of Christianity, before tracing how subsequent thought, first within an explicitly theological framework, and subsequently from secular foundations, developed from this problematic. With chapters on figures in early and Medieval Christian philosophy, modern philosophy, German Idealism, Nietzsche, Arendt, post-structuralism, and contemporary analytical philosophy, it demonstrates the breadth and depth of thinking on evil within this tradition and includes discussions on thinkers not normally included in analyses of the topic, such as Jacques Lacan and Cornelius Castoriadis. These reveal that, far from being something clear and obvious as common-sense, everyday intuition tends to hold, the meaning and nature of evil has been remarkably complex, differentiated, and contested.

Must we fight terrorism with terror and torture with torture? Must we sacrifice civil liberty to protect public safety? In the age of terrorism, this book argues that we must not shrink from the use of violence. But its use – in a liberal democracy – must be measured. And we must not fool ourselves that whatever we do in the name of freedom and democracy is good. We may need to kill to fight the greater evil of terrorism, but we must never pretend that doing so is anything better than a lesser evil. In making this case, this book traces the modern history of terrorism and counter-terrorism, from the nihilists of Czarist Russia and the militias of Weimar Germany to the IRA and the unprecedented menace of Al Qaeda. The author shows how the most potent response to terror has been force, decisive and direct, yet restrained. The public scrutiny and political ethics that motivate restraint also give democracy its strongest weapon: the moral power to endure when vengeance and hatred are spent.

International peacekeeping is one of the primary ways that global and regional institutions, such as the United Nations and the African Union, respond to conflict, violence, instability, and human rights abuses. While a major component of many peacekeeping operations is military, peacekeeping is different enough from other military options that trying to analyse its proper conduct using the traditional just war principles of jus in bello is inadequate. A moral analysis of peacekeeping must take full account of the fact that peacekeepers should not relate even to hostile forces as enemies; and, that peacekeeping is an endeavour that shares many characteristics with war, policing, and governance, but is distinct from all three. This book outlines a moral structure for peacekeeping centered on the idea that peacekeepers are there to manage violence (both that of parties to the conflict and their own) in such a way to permit a damaged political community to heal itself. It argues for a new understanding of the “holy trinity” of peacekeeping – consent, impartiality, and minimum use of force, based on dozens of field interviews with peacekeepers, and drawing on philosophical work in the ethics of care, deliberative democracy, and theories of respect, as well as research on the psychology of violence and concrete discussions of the conflicts and interventions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, and Somalia. It also discusses the relationship between peacekeeping and the responsibility to protect civilians, and the distinction from related operations, such as peace enforcement and counterinsurgency.

This book explores a contradiction at the heart of modern thought about what it is to be human: the belief that human beings cannot commit a radically evil act purely for its own sake, and the evidence that radically evil acts are committed, not by ‘monsters’, but by ordinary human beings. This contradiction can be seen most clearly when we consider the most extreme forms of evil – war crimes, serial killers, sex offenders, children who kill. This book shows that the traditional position – that evil is an active force creating monsters in human shape – is still at work, both in the popular imagination, cultivated in fiction and film, and in real form in politics and the media, most recently in relation to migrants and ‘terrorists’. Drawing on philosophical ideas as well as on theological perspectives, psychological theories and fictional representations, this book asks us to reconsider our understanding of human nature. It reaches the radical conclusion that the discourse of evil is mythological, such that describing any agent as evil is to make them a mythical figure, lying beyond the human realm. The only protection against such figures is their complete destruction. This mythic discourse of evil has played its role in some of the most terrible events in human history, encouraging people to the most extremely vindictive and violence acts against those who have been identified as the ‘evil enemy.’

In line with ‘Continental’ approaches to critical animal studies, this book aims to uncover the philosophical and historical progression of concepts of animal and organic life, in order to understand the logic of the human-animal distinction at play across the life sciences and medicine. This is opposed to traditional moral philosophical analyses of animal life in terms of intrinsic value, sentience and rights, which limit ‘the animal question’ to that of admissibility to the circle of morally considerable agents and patients. This book focuses, in particular, on the categorisation of certain forms and functions of life as ‘pathological’, and the mobility of this categorisation both in philosophy and the sciences in question. The book argues through conjunctions of the thought of a range of philosophers, including Henri Bergson, Georges Canguilhem, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault (on biopolitics), Alfred North Whitehead and Donna Haraway, on questions of animal being and the process of the advancement of scientific knowledge, that the category of ‘pathological life’ can yield productive insights into prevailing concepts of animality and the derogation of animal life.