Introduction: Ethics, Politics and the Third Person

Levinas is, in many ways, an obvious starting point for an investigation of non-theoretical and post-foundational ethical approaches. His work is central to the configuration of ethics as relationality, which was introduced in Chapter 1. He is explicitly concerned with offering an alternative to universalisation and totalisation, which he does through reconfiguring the idea of relation with a focus on the Other. This leads to two key interrelated insights, which shape the rethinking of ethics in terms of relationality: first, the presentation of subjectivity as relational and responsible; second, the immediate, pre-conscious and thus non-theoretical nature of responsibility.

Levinas is perhaps a less obvious resource for questions of politics. Certainly, for the authors considered in the previous chapter, he is the thinker of ethics, rather than politics. For them, limitations emerge in his thought when it comes to relating ethics to politics. The approaches outlined in Chapter 1 share a reading of Levinas in which ethics is seen as separable from politics and prior to it. Levinas is understood to provide a relatively unproblematic ethical starting point, and whether the subsequent move from ethics to politics is seen to be a strength or weakness in his work presupposes that such a move is necessary, due to the initial separation of the two realms.