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‘In it for Myself’: Liberal Morality in Neoliberal Times.
No full textDrawing on Wendy Brown’s account of neoliberalism as a political rationality, in this paper I argue that moral philosophy plays a crucial role in perpetuating precarity. According to Brown’s argument neoliberalism extends market values to all social actions, undermining the differentiation of moral and economic spheres previously found under liberal democracy. While Brown notes the shared ontological status of markets and morality aimed at individual freedom, neoliberalism is argued to radically subordinate the moral foundations of classical liberalism to economic rationality while championing market logics as the ultimate arbiter of value, shifting responsibility to individuals. I explore this argument through Adorno's critique of bourgeois coldness. With Adorno I argue that the normalisation of self-interest as a moral imperative leads to indifference towards the suffering of others. I contend that neoliberalism’s emphasis on flexibility and self-interest and moral philosophy’s disavowal of compassion fosters a culture of competition and insecurity in contemporary society. This contributes to a pervasive sense of coldness towards others, reinforcing indifference and underpinning precarity. However, in contrast to Brown, I argue that neoliberalism does not mark a rupture with a previous liberal order but is an extension of liberal morality that fosters a violent culture of self- interest
"Splendid Failures":Inclination, Slow Regicide, and Performative Critique
No full textThis paper focuses on Honig’s critical reworking of the concept of inclination and her concept of “slow regicide”. With “slow regicide” Honig describes a performative critique of the violence of the patriarchal order. However, what Honig underestimates, I argue, is that this intervention must itself be non-violent if it is not to reinstate patriarchal violence. My suggestion is that paying closer attention to the performativity of inclination shows how “slow regicide” enables a non-violent refusal in which the normativity of patriarchy is frustrated and fails
Responding to Precarity:Ethics and Mediation in Butler and Adorno
Full text linkThis chapter argues that Adorno’s concept of mediation is relevant for Judith Butler’s relational ethics. In response to the precarity of contemporary life, Butler develops an account of relationality that is a vital source for theorising ethics. However, I argue that Butler’s theorisation of responsibility lapses into a pre-social foundational account, which is a position she is keen to avoid. Via Adorno’s concept of mediation, I argue that the ways in which we understand ethical claims are mediated by their relation to other concepts and society. As such, I maintain that any attempt to find ethical responsibility in an unmediated way, that is, without attending to particular social conditions, will fail to be sufficiently critical of the precarity in which human life is constituted
Behind the Address:Adorno, Butler, and the Mediation of Relationality
No full textThis paper argues that Adorno’s concept of mediation is relevant for Judith Butler’s relational ethics. Butler develops an account of relationality that is a vital source for theorising an ethics of non-violence in which ethical demands always emerge within the realm of political contestation. Drawing on Levinas, Butler argues that our ethical obligations emerge due to the primacy of the address of the other. This means that we are in an unchosen relation of interdependency with others. This account of relationality becomes a vital resource for theorising ethics because it entails that interdependency, vulnerability and impingement provide a framework for a theory of responsibility. This is linked to Butler’s relational ontology that conceives of the human as vulnerable and dependent. I shall argue here, however, that there are two incompatible positions in Butler’s relational ethics and social ontology. Butler’s relational ethics invoke Levinas’s pre-ontological scene and makes the claim that the self is always produced through a primary impingement from the ‘other’. I argue that the way in which Butler does this inadvertently reintroduces a foundation, located outside of the social world, that grounds ethical responsibility. This is a problem because it undermines Butler’s socialised account of ontology. It does so because it entails a contradictory position: on the one hand, Butler’s work aims to displace any merely ‘given’ and foundational account of the human; on the other, this very displacement involves introducing an immediate and foundational ethical relation. My contention here is that such a foundation locates ethics as prior to political contestation, and that this obfuscates the political structure of ethical claims. In response to this issue, I propose that Adorno’s account of the mediation between subject and object offers an alternative account of relationality; one in which all ethical questions are formulated within historical, social, and economic conditions. I argue that there can be no independent foundation for ethics, prior to sociality; ethical obligations are themselves mediated by the concepts that make them intelligible and by the social world which makes that understanding possible. As such, with Adorno, I maintain it is a problem to begin by assuming an ethical relation to the other, because that relation, and the conception of ethical obligations that it entails, should itself be viewed as a mediated construction. As such, I maintain that any attempt to found ethical responsibility in an unmediated way, that is without attending to particular social conditions, will fail to be sufficiently attendant to the relations in which human life is constituted. In drawing Adorno’s work in this way, I intend to show how Butler’s relational ethics can be defended without relapsing into a pre-social account of the ethical subject and the ongoing relevance of Adorno’s work for contemporary post foundational ethics. <br/
Philosophy across borders:perspectives from contemporary theory, edited by Emma Ingala and Gavin Rae, New York, London, Routledge, 2025, 266 pp., ISBN 9781032462912
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Re-examining Precarity:Adorno’s critique of Instrumental Reason in contemporary critical theory
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