Title: Ethics and Political Imagination in Feminist Theory

Title: Ethics and Political Imagination in Feminist Theory Published in Feminist theory, subject to some minor changes. https://urlproxy.sunet.se/canit/urlproxy.php?_q=aHR0cHM6Ly9kb2kub3JnL zEwLjExNzcvMTQ2NDcwMDEyMDk1ODI1Ng%3D%3D&_s=ZXZlbGluYS5qb2hhbnNzb2 4td2lsZW5Ab3J1LnNl&_c=98641609&_r=b3J1LXNl Abstract This article discusses three different conceptions of ethics within contemporary feminist theory and how they depict the connection between ethics and politics. The first position, represented by Wendy Brown, mainly describes ethics as a sort of anti-political moralism and apolitical individualism, and hence as a turn away from politics. The second position, represented by Saba Mahmood, discusses ethics as a precondition for politics, while the third position, represented by Vikki Bell, depicts it as the ‘external consciousness’ of the political, and as destabilizing political discourse by confronting it with singularity and ‘radical’ difference. Though they represent distinct positions, the article argues, all three suffer from a tendency to reify ethics by failing to give a contextualized account of it. The article then introduces the ethical perspective of Judith Butler, arguing that she – while offering both a transhistorical and a contextualized dimension – tends to psychologize and individualize ethics and politics. The last part of the article introduces Terry Eagleton and what, in a Marxian vein, could be called a ‘materialist ethics’ or an ‘ethics of socialism’ and argues that this way of framing the relationship between ethics and politics provides a solution to the trap of reification identified in the three described positions. This part also discusses how Eagleton’s theory relates to – but also differs from – arguments made by Butler. One advantage of Eagleton’s work, the article argues, is that it does not psychologize and individualize ethics and politics as Butler’s work does. Keywords Feminist ethics, feminist politics, feminist theory, materialist/socialist ethics, vulnerability, Marxism. Title: Ethics and Political Imagination in Contemporary Feminist Theory Within feminist theory and radical political theory in general, ethics and politics are often described as intertwined or interlinked (Bar On, 1998; Mahmood 2011, 35; Butler 2015, Eagleton 2004, 144). The literary scholar Terry Eagleton goes as far as to state that: ‘The paradigm of classical morality in our own time has been feminism, which insists in its own way on the interwovenness of the moral and political, power and the personal’ (Eagleton 2004, 144). What does this statement imply? A simple answer would be that just as much as feminism is a project that explicitly aims to challenge structures that maintain the economic, social and cultural oppression of women and other marginalized groups, it also is a movement in which the relation between the self and the other is negotiated. Or, as Judith Butler phrases it, it contains ‘the ethical question, how ought I to live? Or even the political question, how ought we to live together?’ (Butler 2015, 44). Feminism, in its various and conflicting forms, can hence be understood as invested in changing the world as well as in transforming the self and its relations to others. However, this statement does not explain how this specific relation ought to be understood. I argue that how we conceptualize the relation between ethics and politics reveal how we engage in feminist thinking and what we want feminism to be. The various ways of describing this 2 relationship could actually be understood as involved in an ongoing struggle over what feminist scholar Vikki Bell has called the ‘political imagination of feminism itself’. For Bell, ethics is not perceived as a feminist value to which we should adhere in order to improve our political practices, but rather as a field that is directly connected to our understanding of feminist politics. By studying articulations of feminist ethics, we accordingly study articulations of feminist politics: Indeed, it is to open up a set of concerns that have not traditionally been addressed at the site of ethics. These turn less on how we conceive the inter-subjective encounter and more on how we understand the political imagination of feminism itself (Bell 2007, 48). In this article, I will discuss different ways of understanding the relation between ethics and politics in contemporary feminist thought. Since feminist discussions of ethics are multiple and articulated within a number of different disciplines, each using and referring to established concepts and ongoing discussions within specific scientific contexts and traditions, I will not attempt to give an exhaustive account of all these various conversations and debates. Instead, I will focus on three specific positions represented by Wendy Brown, Saba Mahmood and Vikki Bell respectively, all of which conceptualize ethics within the context of continental philosophy, implicitly responding to the questions on the relation between ethics and politics that were articulated after what is often called the ‘ethical turn’ in political philosophy during the 1980s, and that the editors of the anthology The Turn to Ethics articulate in the following way: ‘What kind of turn is the turn to ethics? A Right turn? A Left turn? A wrong turn? A U-turn? Whose turn? Whose turn is it to turn to ethics? And why? Why now?’. (Garber et al. 2000, vii). The question at issue in all the positions investigated in the first part of this article is precisely whether ethics should be understood as politically radical or instead as a threat to transformative politics. While the first position roughly describes ethics as anti-political moralism and as apolitical individualism, the second position considers ethics as the very foundation of the political. The third 3 describes ethics as the external consciousness of the political, which destabilizes the political discourse by confronting it with singularity and ‘radical’ difference. I will outline these three different positions and discuss what I consider to be a lack of a contextualization of ethics in each of them and why this is problematic. I will then investigate Butler’s recent work on ethics and politics, arguing that although it introduces a well-needed contextualization combined with a focus on transhistorical aspects of ethics and politics, it ends up being too individualizing and psychologizing. I will thereafter introduce Eagleton in order to analyze how ‘materialist ethics’, as his position could be called in a Marxian vein, might help us to avoid the traps that I have identified in the previously discussed positions. I will particularly discuss how Eagleton’s theory relates to – but also differs from – arguments made by Butler (Butler 2015, 2010, 2004). While Butler often psychologizes and individualizes politics, Eagleton points directly to the need of a struggle for a socialist society in which human needs are met. Ethics as a Turn Away from Politics In an interview in the wake of the Occupy movement in the USA, Brown expresses her doubts about the ability of ethics to serve as a component in political struggles for change, describing its prioritization of self-reflection and one-to-one relationships as a possible threat to political struggles. Brown states that: ‘[A]n ethics is not going to get us to political and economic orders that are more democratic than those we have now’ (Celikates & Jansen 2013). In her critique, Brown explicitly turns against political thinking inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. These thinkers articulate ethics in two distinct ways. While the first of these turns – informed by Foucault and Deleuze – focuses on the transformation of the self, the second one – connected to the thought of Derrida, but also Emmanuel Levinas – gives attention to the relation between the self and the other. Feminist scholar Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, in her discussion 4 of feminist ethical theory, has categorized the first one as an ethos of becoming and the second one as an ethos of responsibility (Ziarek 2001,13). Brown rejects both these traditions, arguing that: The way that Foucauldian, Derridean and Deleuzian thinking has derailed democratic thinking is that it has pushed it off onto a path of thinking about how I conduct myself, what is my relation to the other, what is my ethos or orientation towards those who are different from me – and it is all fine, but it’s not democracy in the sense of power sharing (Celikates & Jansen 2013). Brown’s hesitation is articulated in her earlier work as well. We find a famous example, where she critiques anti-political and moralist feminism, in Politics out of History. With reference to Friedrich Nietzsche, she suggests that a distinctive trait of this stance is that it avoids discussing political questions of power by adopting a position of victimhood in an act of ressentiment (Brown 2001, 18-44). According to Brown, it is the will to power that constitutes the very foundations of political action; when categories of good and evil – rather than a power struggle over the political agenda – become the primary features of a political discussion, then we are no longer dealing with politics in the ideal sense of the word. Brown does grant moral values the role of giving political struggle a moral foundation. However, throughout her work ethics and morals mainly appears as a threat to the political, both in their insistence on the conduct of singular subjects as transgressive and responsible, and in their moralizing tendencies (Brown 1995, 2001). To understand Brown’s position that ethical perspectives in political struggles contain the risk of moralism and individualism, we need to contextualize her political thinking in a Marxist and postMarxist tradition. Brown’s ideal of a politics based on conflict rather than on the question of what is good bears an affinity with post-Marxist thinkers Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau’s idea of politics as articulations of interests rather than the expression of pre-existing interests of certain 5 groups or classes, a viewpoint that they develop together in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Mouffe & Laclau 1985). In other words, politics is the articulation of conflicts, not the expression of preexisting conflicts between victims and perpetrators, and hence is not concerned with the moral categories of good and evil. While transformative politics is about arguing for certain political goals in conflict with other political convictions, moralism, according to Brown, is based on the belief that one is a righteous victim, and therefore one refuses to engage in discussion (Brown 1993, 395). It is a question of power games, not of truth. According to Brown, ethics becomes anti-political because it focuses on individual conduct and moral values rather than antagonist collective struggles and an acknowledgement of the will to power as an important driver of political struggle. The definition of ethics and morals on which Brown relies is indebted to certain strands of Marxist thinking that consider ethics and morals to be bourgeois phenomena that stand in stark opposition to collective political struggles to radically change class structured societies (also see Weeks 2011:11 for a feminist Marxist example of a similar position). The Marxian sociologist Werner Sombart goes so far as to speak of an anti-ethical tendency in Marxism: ‘Marxism is distinguished from all other socialist systems by its anti-ethical tendency. In all of Marxism from beginning to end, there is not a grain of ethics, and consequently no more of an ethical judgment than an ethical postulate’ (Sombart 1971, 12). Sombart’s claim is based on formulations by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels such as the following: ‘Law, morality, religion, are to him [the proletarian] so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests’ (Marx & Engels 1976, 6:49-5). Phil Gasper depicts this Marxist tradition in his article on Marx, morality and ethics stating that: “According to the German socialist and philosopher Karl Vörlander writing in the early twentieth century, ‘The moment anyone started to talk to Marx about morality, he would roar with laughter’ ” (Gasper, 2013). The underlying assumption in this Marxist tradition is that, by focusing on ideas of good and evil and the ability of singular subjects to conform to these values in their conduct of life, ethics diverts attention away from the political system in which these actions take 6 place. Hence, ethics becomes not only different from politics, but actually an antagonist of the political, defined as the struggle over means rather than a question of virtues and values. In his book Minima Moralia (2005), Theodor Adorno expresses this Marxist critique of ethics by asking: ‘Can one lead a good life in a bad life?’, implying that any effort to do good in an unfair system is deluded. It is rather the system itself that should be changed. This position, however, is in no way representative of Marxist positions in general, even if – as Eagleton has stated – it often has been understood as representing the Marxist view on ethics. This is partly due to the fact that Marx himself, as Eagleton argues, dissociates himself from ethics by failing to make the important distinction between moralism and morals/ethics. By equating moralism and ethics – as Gasper argues similarly to Eagleton – the latter is reduced to moral conduct controlled by bourgeois values (Gasper 2013). The possibility of understanding ethics beyond a bourgeois framework is thus not thoroughly investigated in part of the work of Marx and some of his interpreters. It is within the context of this quite narrow definition of ethics, I argue, that Brown’s critique of ethics as apolitical is articulated. While Brown discusses how ethical values can function as a way of criticizing the (non)ethics of neoliberalism, she tends to describe ethics in itself as a threat to politics. In other words, Brown does not really allow ethics to take any other shape than a conservative and self-obsessed moralism, and thereby reifies it as this specific form of bourgeois conduct and form of appearance. Consequently, in the work of Brown ethics is more or less in opposition to radical political action. Brown thus makes the mistake of generalizing the bourgeois historically specific form of appearance by ignoring or abstracting it from the political context of ethics. A consequence of this narrow notion of ethics and the critique it implies is that it runs the risk of producing cynical positions where expressions of care and empathy – in a one-to-one relationship 7 – are always understood as undermining politics or being politically naive, rather than being seen as a potential starting point for political action. To feel or mourn with the other becomes a target of suspicion, a sign of false political consciousness. Or, as Paul Gilroy phrases it in his essay “Offshore Humanism”, where he criticizes the tendency to uncritically equate conceptions such as care, empathy and sympathy with western imperialism: For today’s purposes, what seems more important than those epochal changes is the fact that among radicals and what is left of what used to be the left, the ideas of empathy and sympathy have been allowed to sink into disrepute. That trend seems to be particularly evident among militant academics – whose moral and political perspectives in the era after critique reject what Hannah Arendt described as the politics of pity and have been tempered by the effects of the anti-humanist training bequeathed to them by the second half of the twentieth century. One of Britain’s most celebrated feminist scholars recently spoke for this generation of disoriented radicals when her busy twitter feed dismissed sympathy peremptorily as an “imperialist notion”. On the other hand, in his televised Christmas message to the British people, Abdullah Kurdi, the grieving father of the children whose bodies had so eventfully been washed ashore on Turkey’s Aegean coast, pleaded for “just a little bit of sympathy from you” (Gilroy 2016). ‘A little bit of sympathy’ does not – according to Gilroy – always have to imply imperialism or empty humanism, but can actually be a real sign of empathy that carries the promise of political action when feeling with somebody is tied to acting in solidarity with that very person. Here, ethics, in the relational sense, or in the way in which Ziarek categorizes ethics as the ethos of responsibility, serves as a precondition for political action rather than as a turn away from politics. 8 Ethics as a Political Foundation While Brown argues for the importance of protecting the political from the de-radicalizing tendencies of ethics and moralism, even if ethical values can be used politically, other feminist thinkers maintain that politics and ethics are always intertwined. According to this view, ethics must be understood as the foundation of politics rather than as its antagonist, since ethics constitutes the very subject or agent of political action. Scholars such as Mahmood, among others, who – inspired by the work of Foucault – argue that we should understand ethics as a creative disciplinary practice without which we cannot understand political action, defend this position: This compartmentalization of the ethical and the political is made all the more difficult to sustain if we take into account an insight that has become quite commonplace in the academia today, namely that all forms of politics require and assume a particular kind of a subject that is produced through a range of disciplinary practices that are at the core of the regulative apparatus of any modern political arrangement (Mahmood 2005, 33). Mahmood’s main point is that if we understand subjects to be produced and reproduced by specific disciplinary practices, subjectivity becomes crucial not only to understanding the continued existence of political systems, but also to challenging those systems. Political action must begin with the subject and its relationship to itself, and therefore the compartmentalization of ethics and politics should be theoretically counteracted (Mahmood 2005:32). By not accepting the neat separation between ethics and politics, the ‘analysis of ethical practices of self-formation takes on a new, distinctly political, relevance’, which means that we need to challenge our conceptions of both the political and ‘the substance of ethics’ (Mahmood 2005:34, 35). Social theorist Thomas Lemke advocates a similar position, arguing that Foucault’s work on governmentality can be understood as a development of Marx’s critique of political economy: ‘Foucault showed that labour 9 power must first be constituted before it can be exploited, that life time must be synthesized into labour time’ (Lemke 2002, 58). It is this conviction that makes Foucault ask what would happen if the subject were to turn against the disciplinary practices and mold herself differently, in an act called ethics, or ‘the care of the self’ (Foucault, 1994). In this version, ethics is not a set of fixed norms or values – such as, say, humanism – but rather a way of life, relating to the self as a work of art that should be perfected. Or as Mahmood phrases it: ‘Foucault’s conception of positive ethics is Aristotelian in that it conceives of ethics not as an Idea, or a set of regulatory norms, but as set of practical activities that are germane to a certain way of life’ (Mahmood 2005, 22). This way of conceptualizing ethics, as a form of practice directed towards the self, has been of great importance to many thinkers within queer theory and to how they confront questions of change, resistance and political action through subjective transgression. Ethics becomes a way of liberating the subject from normative disciplinary orders, by transgressing certain given forms of subjectivity. It is the subject’s capability to become something other than what it is, to paraphrase Foucault, that interests queer thinkers such as Benda Hofmeyr, who understands queer ethics as the ‘power of self-formation’ (Hofmeyr 2006). Although ethics and politics are argued to be inescapably and necessarily intertwined, there is often an emphasis on the self-making of the subject, which results in a lack of analysis of the political context by which the ethical subject is said to be constituted and that can be undermined by means of a certain form of care for the self. Society, which is already presumed to be heterosexist, racist, neoliberal etc., is seldom scrutinized or studied. This lack of analysis of the context in which the subject emerges, I would argue, is an example of what Nancy Fraser describes as ‘more a symptom of a desire for a systematic critique than a substantive contribution to it’ (Fraser 2014, 55). We might, for example, argue that the subject, through various self-transformative practices, resists the capitalist system, but if we do not have a clear picture of what characterizes contemporary 10 capitalism, a focus on self-transformative practices risks leading us astray. Criticism of political systems is easily displaced by an interest in the subject as the privileged site of resistance. Moreover, the tendency to focus on transgression of norms, and to equate this transgression with political radicalism, neglects the fact that far from all norms stand in opposition to radical politics. Norms might contribute to emancipation, and transgression might – at certain moments – reinforce a certain oppressive political order. As feminist scholar Shannon Winnubst argues, the focus on transgression within queer theory, for example, could be understood as compatible with the neoliberal capitalist demand for constant change and reinvention of the self (Winnubst 2015, 22). Understanding ethics as transgression, in other words, leads us astray politically, because ethics as transgression has no clear political claims or content beyond transgression itself. Mahmood, however, explicitly turns against what she considers to be an over-emphasis on the subversive and transgressive subject in queer theory, stating that the practice of certain norms – such as religious norms – can itself form the basis of actions of resistance and agency (Mahmood 2011, 21). Therefore, her work actually breaks with this aspect of queer theory that Winnubst, in my view, accurately points to. However, feminist scholar Alyson Cole has argued – and in this I agree – that Mahmood’s theoretical intervention, with its search for hidden subjective agency in norm conforming behavior, still does not break with the feminist privileging of subjective agency (Cole 2016, 271). Thus, she does not break with a tradition that situates political resistance within the subject and its ways of negotiating and inhabiting norms. So, while Brown tends to describe ethics as moralism, Mahmood has a tendency to blur the distinction between ethics and politics, arguably at the expense of political analysis. Characteristic of both positions is that their lack of investigation of the context of ethical conduct leads them to reify ethics. Between Brown’s somewhat stern Marxian analysis of the first position, and Mahmood’s rather inward subject-oriented stance, other feminist thinkers have tried to find a 11 middle ground that, like the first position and unlike the second one, understands ethics and politics as distinct and in conflict with each other, without – as in the first position – describing the ethical in a politically pejorative manner. Ethics as the Radical Other’s Infinite Demand In Culture & Performance – The Challenge of Ethics, Politics and Feminist Theory (2007), Vikki Bell sets out to articulate ‘a middle route’ between two understandings of ethics similar to the two discussed above (57). She does so by arguing that ethics and politics are incompatible and that there is an unbridgeable gap between the demands posed by ethics on the one hand and those posed by politics on the other. Bell bases her separation of ethics and politics on a distinction made by Levinas, who described ethics as a defense of the singular, and the political as the art of the collective. According to this view, the sanctification of the singular within ethics leads to a radical resistance against politics that is based on identification and a need to relate to or understand the other: Levinas’s ethics relies upon maintaining the alterity of the other, so that the asymmetry between one and the other is not collapsed into the same, into identification, as if I could share her suffering. The possibility of identification is refused, while the suffering that the suffering of the other produces in me, is the only meaning that suffering can have (Bell 2007, 54). This implies, according to Bell, that we cannot let ethics be constitutive of a general principle for action. That would be to go against the only principle of ethics, which is its faithfulness to the singular. Taking this understanding of ethics as her point of departure, Bell defines feminism as a political negotiation of the non-ethical. She argues that feminism is synonymous with the creation of symmetry, in its search for common grounds and shared suffering. Without this search for symmetrical understanding, feminism would be completely powerless and politically useless. As 12 feminists, we need to forge some sort of common ground or at least a common goal. Feminism is understood here as the active formulation of political strategies, and this formulation is rendered possible through a violation of the demand of non-totalizing acts inscribed in an ethical stance: ‘In the name of effecting change, of being political, the other’s particularity and exteriority is diminished and interiorized’ (Bell 2007, 57). There will always, according to Bell, be a struggle over who feminism should represent, and how this subject should be represented. This is what makes feminism inherently political. However, ethics is not completely excluded from feminism. Rather, it becomes a reminder of the violent exclusion inherent in politics, and makes feminism aware of the exclusions it performs in order to function. This, in turn, forces feminism to reflect, negotiate and transform its own exclusionary political practices. Ethics is thus neither the antithesis of politics nor the basis of it, but rather its constant follower or consciousness, always pushing feminism to reflect on its own limits. Hence, in Bell’s view, ethics is neither an absolute antagonist of the political nor its foundation. In this sense, Bell offers us the middle route that she promises. I would argue, however, that she does so only superficially. Describing ethics as the defender of radical difference, as well as that which escapes identification, makes it quite vague and mysterious. Rather than being intertwined with politics, it becomes something that politics must negate in order to function, even though politics can never fully succeed in doing so. While politics is concrete and ‘contemporary’, taking responsibility for the historical context in which it finds itself, ethics becomes a trans-historical refusal of the demand of articulation that the concrete context of politics imposes on us. Ethics has political meaning while not being political, and has political effects without making political claims. In this sense, Bell is not as far removed from Brown as one might initially have thought. They both argue that ethics and politics stand in conflict with one another, but understand this conflict as being more or less productive. While for Brown, ethics is what de-radicalizes politics, 13 for Bell, it is what destabilizes a political practice and reduces the risk of it becoming overly totalizing. Both, however, describe the relationship between ethics and politics in fairly transhistorical terms, where politics is contextualized and ethics is understood as ‘outside’ of history – even if the use of ethics and morals itself is historicized by Brown – as being always conservative or always destabilizing. Thus, Bell is not really offering a third position. Ethics is still reified – but here as something mysterious and unidentifiable that – precisely because it is not political in the sense of articulating the commonalities – radicalizes the political. I have now presented three different understandings of the relation between politics and ethics. I argue that the first position – while granting some political importance to ethical values –dismisses ethics as individualized moralism too easily, while the second position collapses politics and ethics together in an overly simplistic way. The third position, finally, turns ethics into something obscure. While claiming to offer a middle route between the first two positions, it actually ends up very close to Brown’s. What we are offered is an understanding of ethics as either a potential threat to political struggle, a subject-oriented practice, or a celebration of difference. Regardless of the manifest differences, an important commonality that unites the three positions is their reification of the ethical as something that, no matter the context, stands in a specific and un-historical relation to the political. I will now turn to Butler, who – by her work on ethics and politics and her distinction between precariousness and precarity – should be able to offer us a more contextual conception of ethics while still being sensitive to some of its transhistorical features. 14 An Ethics of Precariousness In her recent work Butler, famous for her ‘turn to ethics’ in books such as Frames of War (2004), Precarious Life (2010), and Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), points to the intersection of ethics and politics. Butler states that she wants to think about the relationship between ‘morality, or ethics more broadly, and social and economic theory’ (Butler 2015, 195). She cites Adorno, who claims that ‘anything that we could call morality today merges into the question of the organization of the world … we might even say that the quest for the good life is the quest for the right form of politics’ (ibid). In this sense, Butler deviates from any project that tries to separate ethics and politics from each other, arguing that ethics – though based on a condition that is not contingent – is always articulated in, and must address, a specific political and social context. This, she seemingly offers us a position that is contextualizing ethics. In her endeavor to understand ethics and politics as intertwined, Butler highlights the importance of taking bodily vulnerability and the distribution of precariousness as our starting point when analyzing contemporary politics. Butler points to how bodily vulnerability is a shared condition that has political implications. Here, she makes a distinction between precariousness and precarity. We are all in a state of precariousness, by virtue of being human beings among other humans. But this state of precariousness, depending on your social, political and economic position, is more or less acknowledged. Bodies that are not acknowledged as potentially suffering often suffer more. They are, according to Butler, in a state of precarity. In other words, the concept precarity signifies a social and economic condition while precariousness is a shared human condition. The state of precarity offers a possible starting point for political struggle in Butler’s work: Precarity is a rubric that brings together women, queers, transgender people, the poor, the differently abled, and the stateless, but also religious and racial minorities: it is a social and economic condition, but not an identity (indeed) it cuts across these categories and 15 produces potential alliances among those who do not recognize that they belong to one another. (Butler 2015, 58) However, Butler mainly describes the precariousness of the body as a condition of being dependent on the other, and therefore subject to the Other’s care or aggression. Here, she is inspired by Levinas. Precariousness is an existential and relational situation between two subjects rather than a strictly biological material condition. In this sense, Butler tends to stay within the sphere of the one-to-one relation. Moreover, often she simply translates this ethical relation into political terms, talking – as an example – about the ‘national subject’ (Butler 2010, 49) in order to criticize the politics of the state of Israel or the USA and calling for the ‘overcoming of a certain schism in the national subject’ (ibid). It is a kind of psychologizing of nations, demanding that they become more ethical subjects that can acknowledge their own and others’ vulnerability. Hence, in her work, a lack of justice is frequently depicted as the result of fear of the Other. Therefore, although Butler appears to be writing about transnational politics, in fact she locates the question of ethics at the level of the subject and its conduct, leaving aside the context in which we act. It is a question of acting ethically within the sphere of politics (for a similar argument, see Fax, 2012). While arguing that questions about morality merges into the question about the organization of the world, the political context of ethics becomes strangely marginalized, or even dissolved. I will now, with the help of Eagleton, attempt to formulate another way of defining ethics and its connection to politics, and briefly discuss how this understanding might help us avoid the trap of reification of the ethical in the three previous positions as well as the individualizing and psychologizing aspects of Butler’s position. In other words, I want to use Eagleton to investigate whether we can understand ethics as a both trans-historical and historical category; as both emanating from a context and being something more than this context. I will point to some similarities and differences between Eagleton and Butler, and argue that while Butler is on to 16 something in her work, we need the articulated Marxist stance that Eagleton offers to profit from that contribution. Towards a Materialist/Socialist Ethics In the work of Eagleton we encounter a materialist ethics, or what he himself designate as an ‘ethics of socialism’ (Eagleton 2009, vi). Eagleton, famous for his essayistic and literary style, does not provide us with a systematic ethical theory. However, his ethics is based in a historical materialist perspective and comes into sight in the ongoing discussions on morals, ethics and socialism throughout his corpus. Its critique of idealist theory and its excessive focus on ideas and ideology in isolation from their social conditions are characteristic of historical materialism. Regardless of the mainstream image of historical materialism, it neither erases subjective conduct nor the importance of ideological struggles. An emphasis on material conditions does not imply a disinterest of human agents. As David McNally phrases it: ‘The world of objects is the world of objective human activity’. However, ‘the objective world’ is not possible to reduce to ‘humankind and its history’ (McNally 2000, 74). Eagleton’s approach to ethics is, I want to argue, materialist in two ways: firstly, in its insistence on shared human bodily needs as an important foundation of ethical and political claims; and secondly, in its understanding of ethics as articulated in – and in response to – a specific historical context and its particular economic and political conditions. The materiality in his ethics is, so to speak, both trans-historical and historical. Let us begin with the trans-historical side of the relation. Even though Marxism is often depicted as an anti-humanist political tradition (Eagleton 2011, 80. Also see Geras 1983 for an elaborated 17 discussion on different Marxist views on human nature), Eagleton maintains that some aspects of our “species-being” have moral implications: If another creature is able in principle to speak to us, engage in material labour alongside us, sexually interact with us, produce something which looks vaguely like art in the sense that it appears fairly pointless, suffer, joke and die, then we can deduce from these biological facts a huge number of moral or even political consequences .(Eagleton 1996, 47). In other words, humans have certain abilities and needs, and these abilities and needs are morally demanding, and can be violated in certain historical and political contexts. In her book Liberalism and Human Suffering, Asma Abbas – similar to Eagleton – points to Marx’s understanding of ‘estrangement from species-being’ as ‘one of the aspects of alienation in capitalism’, concluding that ‘Species-being, as a concept and spectral materiality, is rather crucial to Marx’s subversion of capitalism’ (Abbas 2010, 111). Human beings need, according to both Abbas and Eagleton, the nurture and care of others. A just society has to attend to this fundamental human condition, and encourage moral capacities that acknowledge rather than denies this condition. Or as Eagleton phrases it: It is a material fact that we are dependent on others for our physical survival, given the helpless state in which we are born. Yet this material dependency cannot really be divorced from such moral capacities as care, selflessness, vigilance and protectiveness, since what we are dependent on is exactly such capacities in those who look after us (Eagleton 2004, 168). By tying materiality and morality to each other, Eagleton counters the idea that political claims are the sole result of an articulation of antagonism that is discursively constituted, as in the work of Mouffe and Laclau (and Brown). Some political claims are not solely discursive (although of course they have a discursive form when we confront them) but are rooted in the material conditions of 18 the human body and its needs. Here, Eagleton is talking about ethics in relation to what I would call its ‘trans-historical basis’. But the trans-historical aspects of materialist/socialist ethics do not necessarily lead to a lack of political engagement in any self-evident way. It is not a way of replacing political struggle with ontological truths. While Brown concludes that ethics seldom is politically helpful (basing a transhistorical argument on a time-specific moral system), Eagleton demands that ethics engage the very context in which we live. ‘Moral prescriptions’, he argues, ‘must obviously implicate beliefs about how the world is. There is no point in pressing for the abolition of feudal serfdom in Hemel Hempstead’ (Eagleton 2009, 315). In a reading of Marx’s position on ethics, which he claims is more advanced than Marx himself sometimes acknowledges, Eagleton concludes that, in refusing to separate human needs and values from the historical forces in which these are formed and met, Marx avoids the erroneous distinction between ethics and a critical analysis of society: A truly moral inquiry, by contrast, is one which investigates all the aspects of a human situation. It refuses to divorce human values, behavior, relationships and qualities of character from the social and historical forces that shape them. It thus escapes the false distinction between moral judgements on the one hand and scientific analysis on the other. A true moral judgement needs to examine all the relevant facts as rigorously as possible. In this sense, Marx himself was a true moralist in the tradition of Aristotle, though he did not always know that he was (Eagleton 2011, 158). With Eagleton, we do not have to choose between ontology and context; on the contrary, we have to understand and inhabit their complex relation. With his two-fold materialism, Eagleton also escapes subject-oriented ethics. Because he turns ethics into one basis for political claims, by connecting it to bodily needs, instead of reducing it to the actions of singular subjects, we do not end up with a subject-oriented ethics but rather with an idea of a shared bodily vulnerability. Ethics is not something that is entirely contingent either, able to change completely depending on context 19 and situation, since it is actually rooted in something that is. In this sense, ethics is not the same thing as the construction of the self or the subject, or the same thing as transgression. Furthermore, Eagleton presents a more complex side of the story than Brown, Mahmood and Bell do, by not allowing us to dismiss ethics as bourgeois conservative morals or to understand it as a non-historical, radical position that cannot have any influence on the content of politics, and only serve as a destabilizer of political categories of similarity and identification. In Eagleton’s work, ethics is not based on difference and singularity in any strict sense. ‘Difference in itself is’, he states, ‘simply not a sound enough foundation on which to construct either ethics or politics’ (Eagleton 2009, 320). Instead, his ethics is based on the belief that the precariousness of each and every person points to something mutual and universal that can serve as the basis for political demands. Also, he refuses a neat separation between politics and ethics, since these two are always connected on a material level. There is, Eagleton writes, ‘no clear ontological distinction’ between ethics and politics. Rather ‘The difference is more methodological than real’, where the ethical investigation focuses on ‘the values and qualities of human conduct and relationships’ while politics focuses on ‘politics, public institutions and processes of power’ (Eagleton 2009, 306). In order to make room for ethical conduct, however, we need to change the political context in which moral capacities are fostered: ‘If you want to be good, you need a good society. Of course there can be saints in atrocious social conditions, but part of what we admire about such people is their rarity’ (Eagleton 2004, 128). In some regards, Eagleton might seem to offer a similar understanding of ethics and politics as Butler. Like Butler, he emphasizes both existential and contextual aspects of ethics. He also, in a similar way as Butler, points to the precarity of the body as a basis for ethics and politics. Butler and Eagleton differ significantly, however, when it comes to what they accentuate in their work, specifically with regard to how they understand the precariousness of the body. While Butler mainly 20 understands this bodily precarity in a Levinasian sense, pointing to our vulnerability in relation to other subjects, Eagleton – following his historical materialist perspective – understands the body as something that needs the social care of others, as well as such basic things as food, water and shelter, in order to survive, and argues that capitalism tends to violate these needs. The vulnerability of the subject is hence both intersubjective and concretely biological. Also, as I have pointed out – although Butler describes ethics and politics as intertwined, she ends up emphasizing the ethical conduct of the subject. In line with his historical materialist perspective, Eagleton does something else. According to him, an analysis of the fundamental traits of human beings should serve as the basis for universal moral guidelines and – by extension – political claims. We are born dependent, and our survival depends on others. Survival is not possible without moral and ethical abilities, such as the capacity to care and nurture. In this sense, moral values are connected to human nature, and to the pursuit of its realization. A moral life is a life in which individuals can realize their humanity, and this is, as Stefan Arvidsson and Nina Björk states in their reading of Eagleton ‘dependent on politics and economics and not on certain individuals solving moral questions in a certain manner”’(Arvidsson & Björk 2015, 163). Thus, according to Eagleton, we should understand ethics as responding to bodily needs, and politics as the possible realization of ethical values. But a materialist/socialist ethics also demands that we carefully study and confront the context in which we act, and identify the ways in which this context circumscribes our possibilities to act ethically. The political problem is not that capitalists are frightened of their own vulnerability or of the Other – as sometimes appears to be the case in the work of Butler – but rather that they profit from not acknowledging their system’s constant violation of humanity. By not psychologizing political actors, the nation or capitalism – thinking that they need to overcome fear to be able to behave more ethically, Eagleton shows us how ethics is always political, and how ethical action is not solely a question of singular moral conduct, but rather demands the 21 structure of a socialist society in which human needs are met rather than violated. Or as he puts it himself: Ethics and politics are not incommensurable realms, to be linked only by some deft deconstructive footwork, but different viewpoints on the same reality […] The ethical is a matter of how we may live with each other most rewardingly, while the political is a question of what institutions will best promote this end (Eagleton 2009, 324-325). List of references Abbas, Asma. 2010. Liberalism and Human Suffering. Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics New York: Palgrave Macmillian Adorno, Theodor. 2005. Minima Moralia – Reflections on Damaged Life. London: Verso. 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Celikates, Robin & Jansen, Yolande. 2013. “Reclaiming Democracy: An Interview with Wendy Brown on Occupy, Sovereignty, and Secularism” in Critical Legal Thinking – Law and the Political, http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/01/30/reclaiming-democracy-an-interview-with-wendybrown-on-occupy-sovereignty-and-secularism/. Cole, Alyson. 2016. “All of Us Are Vulnerable, But Some Are More Vulnerable than Others: The Political Ambiguity of Vulnerability Studies, an Ambivalent Critique”, Critical Horizons, vol. 2, no.17. Eagleton, Terry. 2011. Why Marx was Right. Yale: Yale University Press. Eagleton, Terry. 2009. Trouble with Strangers. A study of Ethics. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Eagleton, Terry. 2004. After Theory. London: Penguin Books. Fax, Joanna. 2012. “Vulnerability as Hegemony: Revisiting Gramsci in the Age of Neoliberalism and Tea-Party Politics”. Culture, Theory and Critique, no. 3. Foucault, Michel. 1994. Ethics, Subjectivity, Truth. New York: The New Press. Fraser, Nancy. 2014. “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode – For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism”. New Left Review, no. 86. Garber, Marjorie, Hanssen, Beatrice and Walkowitz, L. Rebecca. 2000. “Introduction: The Turn to Ethics” in The Turn to Ethics. New York & London: Routledge. Gasper, Phil. 2013. “Marxism, morality, and human nature – Marx rejected bourgeois morality in favour of an ethics of human emancipation”. International Socialist Review, no. 82. Geras, Norman. 1989. “The Controversy about Marx and Justice” in Marxist theory: London: OUP. 23 Geras, Norman. 1983. Marx and Human Nature. The Refutation of a Legend. London: Verso. Gilroy, Paul. 2016. “Offshore Humanism”. Talk in Gothenburg, June 2016. A Swedish translation of the text appears in Ord&Bild, no. 5. Laclau, Ernesto & Mouffe, Chantal. 2014. Hegemony and Socialist strategy. London: Verso. Lemke, Thomas. 2002. “Foucault, Governmentality and Critique”. Rethinking Marxism, vol. 14, no. 3. Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety – The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marx, Karl. 1967. “Toward a critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction” in L. Easton (ed.) Writings on the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, London: Doubleday & Company. Marx, Karl & Engels, Friedrich. 1976. Collected Works. New York: International Publishers. McNally, David. 2001. Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labour, and Liberation. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hofmeyr, Benda. 2006. “The Power not to be (what we are) – the politics and ethics of self-creation in Foucault”, Journal of Moral Philosophy, no 3. Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work. Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Winnubst, Shannon. 2015. Way too Cool – Selling out Race & Ethics, New York: Columbia University Press. 24 Ziarek, Plonowska, Ewa. 2001. An Ethics of Dissensus – Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy, Stanford University Press. 25