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

302 Pages·2001·8.734 MB·English

by  Ewa Płonowska Ziarek

An Ethics of Dissensus

An Ethics of Dissensus
POSTMODERNITY, FEMINISM,
AND THE POLITICS OF
RADICAL DEMOCRACY
EWA PtONOW SKA ZIAREK
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California 2001
Stanford University Press
Stanford. California
© 2001 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Catalogmg-in-Publication Data
Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska
An ethics of dissensus : postmodemity, feminism, and
the politics of radical democracy / Ewa Plonowska Ziarek.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index
ISBN 0-8047-4102-6 (alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8047-4103-4 (pbk. alk. paper)
I Ethics, Modem—20th century 2. Postmodernism.
3 Feminist ethics. 4 Democracy— Moral and ethical
aspects I. Title
BJ324.P67 Z53 2001
170—dc21 00-067943
Original Pnnting 2001
Last figure below indicates year of this pnnting
10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01
Typeset by BookMatters in 10.5/12 Bembo
To Jasia, Carol, and Rita,
whoseßiendship, wisdom, and amazing intelligence
were the inspiration for this project.

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction ι
1. Toward an Experimental Ethos of Becoming; From Docile Bodies to
Ethical Agency 15
2. Ethical Responsibility, Eros, and the Politics of Race and Rights 47
3. Toward an Ethics of Dissensus: Lyotard’s Agonistic Politics and the
Pursuit of Justice 83
4. The Libidinal Economy of Power, Democracy, and the Ethics of
Psychoanalysis 117
5. Labor of the Negative: The Impossible Ethics of Sexual Difference and
the Politics of Radical Democracy 151
6. Postmodern Blackness/Visionary Feminism: Paradigms of Subjectivity,
Community, and Ethics in bell hooks’s Work 183
Afterword 217
Notes 225
Index 277

Acknowledgments
it is my pleasure to thank many colleagues and friends who read and
commented on various parts of this book. In particular, I am indebted to
Kate Baldwin, Robert Bemasconi, Rosalyn Diprose, Thomas Flynn,
Graham Hammill, Cyraina Johnson-Roullier, Dalia Judovitz, Katherine
O’Brien O’Keeffe, Diane Perpich, Hilary Radner, T. Denean Sharpley-
Whiting, and Krzysztof Ziarek for their helpful comments and criticisms. I
am especially grateful to Penelope Deutscher, who read the manuscript in
its entirety and offered invaluable suggestions for revision. Her generous
comments have made this a better book. I would also like to thank Kurt
Schreyer and Carolyn Bitzenhofer for their help in preparing the final ver­
sion the manuscript for publication. I am especially grateful to Henry
Sussman for having faith in this project. Finally, I want to express my grati­
tude to Maria Tomasula for her generous permission to use the reproduction
of her painting, My Alba, for the cover.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Institute of Scholarship in
Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame for a summer research stipend
that helped me to complete the chapter on Levinas.
A section of Chapter 5 appeared in the special issue of Diacritics 28 (1998):
60-75, devoted to the thought of Luce Irigaray. An earlier version of the
first part of Chapter 1, entitled “Between the Visible and the Articulable:
Matter, Interpellation, and Resistance in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish,”
appeared in Resistance, Flight, Creation: Feminist Enactments of French Philo­
sophy, ed. Dorothea Olkowski (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
2000), reprinted by the permission of the publisher, Cornell University
Press.
ix