Ethics After Poststructuralism: A Critical Reader ed. by Lee Chancey Olsen, Brendan Johnston, and Ann Keniston (review)

Reviewed by: Ethics After Poststructuralism: A Critical Reader ed. by Lee Chancey Olsen, Brendan Johnston, and Ann Keniston Lucien Darjeun Meadows Lee Chancey Olsen, Brendan Johnston, and Ann Keniston, editors. Ethics After Poststructuralism: A Critical Reader. McFarland & Company, 2020, 283p. How do we—ethically—relate to the Other? Does the category of “the Other” still hold valence in contemporary critical conversations? Who, for that matter, counts as “we”? How can scholars advance an ethics that resists grand narratives, an ethics that offers planet-wide relevance, and an ethics that opens considerations of human, animal, and ecological sentience? In Ethics After Poststructuralism, editors Lee Olsen, Brendan Johnston, and Ann Keniston offer a robust critical reader centered around Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophies as a pathway toward exploring these important questions. These editors balance their text in a complex space. They offer an inclusive anthology of “ethics after poststructuralism” —a wide field, potentially including philosophers across the world from the 1960s onward—yet they use one significant philosopher, Levinas, as the fulcrum, with inclusions serving to interrogate and advance, to “counter and extend” what they term Levinasian ethics (8). The editors admit that “Levinas never aligned himself with the poststructuralist movement as such” (15), and this categorization is due to subsequent scholars (e.g. Jacques Derrida and Simon Critchley). However, their decision to focus on Levinasian ethics opens a dynamic space for applying his ethics, particularly his assertion that the source of all ethical praxis is in one’s relationship with the “vulnerable Other” (3), across a wide range of disciplines and fields, including: relational theory, psychology, politics, postcolonialism, decoloniality, posthumanism, animal studies, ecology, and more. [End Page 128] Ethics After Postcolonialism organizes sixteen chapters into four sections: “Hospitality and Responsibility for the Other,” “States of Exception,” “Decoloniality and Ethics,” and “Posthuman Ethics.” The selection mindfully includes woman-identified philosophers (almost 40% of the total contributors) and philosophers from nations beyond the United States (e.g. Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, and Turkey). Scholars and students are likely to recognize several names—Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Derrida, Michel Foucault, Walter D. Mignolo, and, of course, Levinas—but many will welcome the opportunity to engage with lesser known or emerging philosophers, like Mary Bunch and Madina V. Tlostanova. In a growing textbook and research market, instructors and researchers alike will enjoy inclusions largely from 2000 onward, and scholars looking for deeper investigations will appreciate that many are condensed versions that originally appeared as articles or book chapters. “Suggested Further Reading” directs readers to a range of anthologies, books, and themed journal issues. Most are for explicitly Levinasian scholarship, which reaffirms the anthology’s slant, but even so, the editors include Levinasian and broader materials on biopolitics, ethics, politics, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, and trauma studies. Witnessing the strong focus on Levinas, this reader was grateful to see how the invited scholars resonate with Levinas and challenge and complicate his ethical philosophy. For these reasons, the chapters in the “Decoloniality and Ethics” section were particularly engaging, since they bring African, Central American, European, and South American perspectives to Levinas’s Eurocentric scholarship. For example, in their collaborative article, Madina V. Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo push against Levinas’s potentially reductive formulation of Same and Other. They extend this conversation from the colonialist formulations and decolonialist implications of labeling humans as Same or Other, to the ecological implications and ethical questions of seeing the Same as humanitas, or fully-human, and the Other as anthropos, or less-than-human (157). In another chapter, Nelson Maldonado-Torres questions Levinas’s infamous 1961 essay describing, “The yellow peril! […] it is spiritual,” his 1986 statement that “humanity consists of the Bible and the Greeks,” and other manifestations of what Maldonado-Torres terms Levinas’s “hegemonic identity politics” (173), interrogating Levinas’s problematic assertions by going beyond [End Page 129] the still-dualistic formations of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek to advance the philosophies of Frantz Fanon and to offer a means toward more sophisticated conceptualizations of alterity and decolonialist humanities. Further, many contributors reference the theories of other contributors to the volume, such as Mari Ruti’s challenge to Judith Butler’s “flight from a priori norms” in her...

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