Ethics of Liberation or Liberation from Ethics? by Bruno Bosteels

Regardless of these minor points, it is clear that we are certainly not lacking in ethical models for criticism and theory in Latin America. Here as elsewhere, this region is constantly in dialogue with the larger debates that have inflected the treatment of ethics in other parts of the world. What, then, is the state of this discussion today? Where do we stand in terms of ethics in the current historical and theoretical conjuncture?

In the context of what Avelar calls "post-phenomenological" thought, I would argue that the dominant modes of ethics today are more specifically post-Heideggerian and post-Levinasian-in short, concerning finitude as exposed in and through language and in the face of the Other. Even Lacan's ethics of desire, drive, or the real seems most often to fit this framework, insofar as it too can be summed up in the notion of finitude. In more recent years, however, another tradition has emerged against the current consensus, in the guise of an ethics of truths as elaborated by Alain Badiou and, after him, by the likes of Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupancˇicˇ. Even from a quick glance at the vast production surrounding the so-called ethical turn, it becomes clear that among the thinkers associated with this phenomenon, Levinas and Badiou not only stand out, but are now frequently combined-despite the harsh polemic against, and ultimate dismissal of, Levinas's thought in Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil.