Appeals to contingency are politically destabilizing and prevents realizing of actual ethical decision-making---it turns the case and causes broader violence.

It is urgent that we consider the limits of the discourse of the other and its assumed association with victimhood, for the discrete borders of these terms break down when considering the violence of the Palestinian suicide bomber, or of the Hutu killing his or her Tutsi neighbor. I will argue that the victimized other has acquired a status beyond critique, that it has become a metaphor for "the good." This is a function of guilt on the part of those who feel responsible for the wounds of yesterday's victims, and of revenge on the part of those who vow never again to be victimized, rendering justice a matter of either self-recrimination or revenge. I am interested in identifying these limits, but we must go beyond a simple deconstruction of victimhood. While a critique of identity politics and its production of the binary logic of victimhood is still relevant, and urgent, it is not my only concern here. The work of Jacques Derrida, as well as that of his contemporaries—proponents of a phenomenological and poststructuralist approach to philosophy—has appealed to me for its attention to unsettling essentialist claims. I have argued in previous work for the usefulness, necessity even, of this kind of destabilizing work for politics—of attending to difference, incommensurability, ambiguity, paradox, aporia, and indeterminacy. Derrida and many of his interlocutors—Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault, among others—have provided what is probably the best critique of the dangers of identity politics, for example. But what has come to be known as the "ethico-political" is unsatisfying on another level. There is a strong resistance to making moral claims of any kind in the interests of preserving particularity, historical context, and contingency. Despite Derrida's stance against capital punishment, for example, his conditional/unconditional formula—the calculable/incalculable, determinate/indeterminate—leaves ambiguous one side of the dialectic: calculative decisions are necessary in matters of morals, law, and politics, but can be dangerous or damaging without the incalculable, the unconditional which is purported to give rise to these decisions. This point is purposely left obscure, as anything "calculable" is considered to be a plan, normative programming, or technology, all of which are condemned as problematic because they cannot account for difference. There is no middle ground here—a serious irony given that Derrida's work is generally preoccupied with middle grounds; one either accepts the terms deconstruction sets out—that politics is undecidable—or falls in with the misguided folks who promote a normative approach. Moral judgment has become an unpopular concept and practice since the promotion of a certain ideology concerning cultural difference. Todd May argues that the French thinkers associated with the poststructuralist tradition have been reluctant to engage in moral discourse. Morality has become the undisputed jurisdiction of the political right, associated with family values and prominent in conservative discourse. On the Left morality itself is believed to contain a certain conservative element, May suggests, one that denies difference. Thus, for example, the Left must defend multiculturalism on the grounds that there are no common values among humans. The universalist claims put forward by morality, it is said, fail to recognize diversity that characterizes different people's moral lives. The argument runs roughly like this: since there are no universal moral values, no set of values can claim ultimate superiority over any other; therefore, people should be exposed to a diversity of moral views. Foucault provides a good example of this avoidance of moral discourse. He makes a case against "universal necessities in human existence" and against "speaking for others" (a sacrosanct policy in feminist discourse). No matter that Foucault certainly speaks for the insane, the imprisoned and sexed subjects throughout his work, Herculine Barbin and Pierre Rivière especially. Emmanuel Levinas's work is said to provide no moral theory, but to promote an "ethical relation to the other" as first philosophy. Morals are passé, replaced by responsibility. As I argue later, however, this is a responsibility for the other without judgment, an abstract ethical relation that leaves no room for grappling with moral dilemmas or for the agency and responsibility of the victimized other. It is curious, then, that these philosophers speak in the name of a politics that is purported to be ethical, and yet we are left with theories—beautiful and seductive perhaps—that are of limited use when it comes to political practice and moral judgment. Their work has had a tremendous impact on the ethico-political, a term that captures what is central to both ethics and politics: the demand for deliberation and urgent action in answer to the question "what should I do?" In privileging responsibility, however, they ignore moral judgment, not morality itself. Ethics becomes about one's relation to the other, and one's infinite responsibility to that other; questions about right or wrong actions are avoided. As in discussions of "the political" (rather than "politics"), "the ethical" is abstracted from any reality that might require a moral act. Hence the conclusion of the first chapter of this book: that Levinas leads us to a benevolent but empty regard for an abstract other. My initial enthusiasm about the usefulness of the poststructuralist tradition for political action has waned as I have become more exposed to the actual details of political work, to the energy and persistence of political actors, and to the perplexed expressions of those practitioners with whom I attempt to discuss the political claims of this body of work. I am not referring to the perplexity of the uneducated in the face of difficult intellectual ideas, but to the skepticism of the political practitioner in the face of the often presumptuous, untested hypotheses of the armchair philosopher. Our interest and intervention in political events cannot remain solely on the plane of textual critique. While this book does not engage with the work of these thinkers in a sustained manner, I take their work and the tradition of which they are a part as my point of departure. Since my initial attraction to Derrida's insistence on the undecidability of politics, preceded by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who rigorously defends the contingency of politics, and Simone de Beauvoir, whose marvelous description of the ambiguity of ethics is as relevant today as it ever was, I have wrestled with how to negotiate what is for many the greatest challenge in the politics of the poststructuralist tradition: how to reconcile contingency with the desire for practical solutions. Derrida demonstrates, perhaps better than most, the impossibility of this reconciliation, and therefore often leaves his readers in the frustrated state of wanting more—more reassurance, security, universality, and normativity. It isn't reassurance or security I am searching for, but relevance and utility; a pragmatic approach to moral and political dilemmas that needs no "unconditional" reference point.