Towards an Ethical Politics of Globalization : Responsibility, Critique, and Praxis in Levinas and Adorno

Is politics, like war, a realm of calculation and strategy? Or is there after all a place in politics for the human relation, for ethics? This book raises the question of ethical politics in a globalized world marked by contradictions and mediations, where the direct translation of ethical values to political projects has repeatedly proven to be self-defeating: defence spawns pre-emptive war; imperialist promise of freedom engenders mass violence; anti-imperial resistance culminates in authoritarian repression. Bringing Emmanuel Levinas's ethics of the other into a constructive dialogue with Theodor W. Adorno's critical theory, this book argues that ethical responsibility enters politics through the intermediary of critique and praxis. It develops an ethical politics of globalization as a critical-practical project grounded in an ongoing tension between critique of injustice and reappropriation of praxis. This formulation is arrived at through constant conversation with concrete historical situations ranging from Nazism and the student movements of the 1960s to Ali Shari'ati's reappropriation of martyrdom in the context of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Moving between theory and historical critique, this book offers a new framework for thinking about political responsibility and ethical praxis under conditions of globalized domination and exclusion.