A politics of avoidance: the limits of weak ontology

Jodi Dean

Grand narratives and strong ontologies have a remarkable hold on contemporary life.
Fundamentalist positions are ever more pervasive and intractable. In the United States, religious
and market fundamentalism impresses itself on global and domestic practices of knowledge, law,
governance, mobility, personhood, hospitality, and justice. Add to this the current reorganization
of the post-WWII economic consensus around social welfare, as well as recent challenges to the
rule of law and international legal conventions (such that Howard Dean is chastised for
suggesting that Osama bin Laden should receive a fair trial, to use one example, or US Attorney
General Alberto Gonzales remark that the Geneva conventions are quaint, to use another) and
it becomes clear that strong ontologies or fundamentalisms raise moral and political questions
that cannot, must not, be avoided. The stakes are high. Without exaggeration we can say that
engagement with religious and market fundamentalism will shape the twenty-first century much
as anti-fascism made its marks upon the twentieth.
Some political theorists argue that the proper response to this fundamentalism is
generosity.1 They elaborate ontologies and ethics that eschew fundamentals and urge an
awareness of the contestability of ones own fundaments or a responsiveness to the limits and
vulnerabilities that necessarily condition the contexts in which we give an account of ourselves. I
consider here work by Stephen White and Judith Butler. White offers the notion of a weak
ontology as a contextually attuned and politically minded response to this moment of
fundamentalist vitality.2 I argue that it is the wrong response, one that turns to acceptance and
affirmation at a juncture when the future of hopes for equality, democracy, and a sustainable,
common being-together demand a more critical, political, response. Critical, as opposed to

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affirmative, theory is necessary today. Whites approach, one that finds common ground among
disparate thinkers, divests critical theories of their oppositional political edge. He makes them
congenial to current power relations at a moment when they need to be sharpened and wielded as
critically and antagonistically as possible. Butler, one of the thinkers White tames and
assimilates, can be read as responding to Whites project for weak ontology. I argue that her
Spinoza lectures do this and more as they develop a notion of ethical accountability that
highlights the necessity of critique. But even as Butlers critical ethics improves upon Whites
ontology, in these times of fundamentalist vigor, they remain too passive, too acquiescent and
compliant. They offer critique, yet avoid the risky political work of condemnation and division,
of specifically and decisively rejecting those religious, nationalist, militarist, and market
fundamentalisms that are today actively rewriting the very terms of personhood, the very
possibility of sustainable living, to benefit the wealthy, privileged few while the majority are
rendered criminal, illegal, diseased, disposable.

Affirming weakness
Stephen Whites Sustaining Affirmation takes on the problems that tenacious
fundamentalisms present for liberal pluralist constitutional regimes. To this end, White rejects
both fundamentalism and so-called postmodernism. He doesnt split the difference and try
pathetically to find some middle road between them. Instead, White holds that the current
political moment requires a response that does more than assert unconditionally on the basis of
the incontrovertible evidence of faith, on the one hand, or that says, on the other hand, that
everyone is different, one can never really know or judge, its ones own personal belief that
really matters, etc. Sustaining Affirmation thus eschews the tired opposition between absolutism

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and relativism or foundationalism and anti-foundationalism to locate in the interface of differing
approaches to political and ethical theory a set of affirmative gestures that prefigure or sustain a
receptive attitude toward the strangeness of the late-modern world.
White finds such affirmative gestures in the work of seemingly disparate thinkers
George Kateb, Charles Taylor, William Connolly, and Judith Butler. He reads these liberal,
communitarian, feminist, and post-Nietzschean thinkers as responding to universalist,
foundationalist, and essentialist claims. In so doing, he distills from them a common practice of
tempering, easing, or defanging ones own theoretical position, a practice characteristic of what
White refers to as a weak ontology. White understands weak ontologies to involve a
tentativeness or uncertainty in the face of the recognition of the contestability of ones own
fundaments, to account for human being in terms of constituent attributes of language, finitude,
natality, and sources (9), to emphasize cultivation rather than argument, conversion,
confrontation, or compulsion, and, to involve a kind of contextualized reflection, alteration, or
folding of the theorys ethical-political aims back into its ontological position. Weak ontologies
are thus theories that embrace their own contestability and understand their theoretical task less
in terms of presenting claims to truth or irrefutable arguments than of nudging, suggesting,
offering, or affirming practices and ways of thinking as valuable, generous, and responsive to the
multiplicities and contingencies of late-modern life.
What a lovely notion. What a nice, nice approach. With his account of weak ontologies,
White is elaborating a project of immanent affirmation, what we might understand as the
opposite of the old Frankfurt School idea of immanent critique. Rather than setting out a critique
of the present, White draws from differing projects to present a positive approach to the
contemporary. In the conclusion, he points to this yes to contemporary life as he reassures

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political liberals who could raise concerns that the ethos of weak ontology might affect the basic
constitutional structure of the liberal democratic state (153). Theres no need to worry, White
reassures them: this ethos does not cast wholesale doubt upon constitutional structures. Rather
it points us primarily toward different ways of living those structures. With such a move, White
divests approaches like Butlers of their critical edge in order to make them congenial to current
power relations.
In my view, critical, as opposed to affirmative, theory is necessary today. Whites
position assumes a political-economic consensus that no longer exists. He repeats without
revising Charles Taylors presumption that a felicitous ontological claim assumes the modern
welfare state and market economy (70). This assumption is deadlyand deadly wrong. It
mistakes the tenacious energy with which the Right in the US (and other countries) is
transforming the state. The welfare state has been crumbling since the seventies. Neoliberal
economics has replaced the welfare states generalized sense of social solidarity and the
collective assumption of risk with the brutal extremes of economic inequality and the heightened
violence and fear of the society of control. In the name of freedom and security, as if these
concepts fit easily together, all three branches of the US government have acquiesced to the use
of torture. Consequently, we now must fight anew for human equality and dignity. We have to
find new arguments, arguments fitting for mobile populations in an integrated world, for just and
sustained economies, for common approaches to living together.
We should not defend all of late modernitys practices and identities. As Whites own
skepticism toward fundamentalism attests, some of these practices and identities involve
dangerous forms of nationalism and authoritarianism. But why avoid political engagement? Why
not fight against those fundamentals one rejects directly, from the standpoint of ones own

5
political convictions? Why cultivate a tolerance or generosity toward practices and positions that
are deeply wrong? Why concede ground to ruthless opponentsespecially when the stakes are
so very, very high?
Despite my continued attachment to critical approaches, I appreciate the clarity with
which Whites questions further the work of political theory. Should we take an affirmative
approach to late modern life? Can affirmation provide a vehicle for political change? Is the
proper response to fundamentalism one of affirmation or does such generosity risk a politics of
avoidance that ultimately accedes to fundamentalist will? Sustaining Affirmation hovers uneasily
between the first two questions, between the affirmation of late modernity and the potential of
affirmation as a political practice.
The notion of a weak ontology could support engaged, oppositional politics. Given the
prevalence of fundamentalism today, contesting the political imposition of the religious
fundaments of the Christian right and widely cultivating generosity toward sexual minorities and
the economically exploited and oppressed would be a dramatic, potentially revolutionary change.
Similarly, the affirmation of contingency could, and Ill add should, inspire a political drive to
struggle for changethings can be different; we do not have to protect and defend the so-called
free market at all costs. White avoids either of these political possibilities. He displaces potential
radicalismwhich would necessitate strong claims, less generosity, and divisionwith an
interiorized cultivation of an ethos of generosity. Political and economic struggles against
fundamentalisms are thereby reformatted as the struggles of a subject against itself.
It may be that White dulls the radical edge of his account of weak ontology because he
doesnt attend to the way that the welfare state has collapsed. In affirming a kind of theoretical
friendship among theorists from differing traditions, he avoids the stark, intractable, and explicit

6
divisions of contemporary global politics. So even though weak ontology does not have to result
in the acceptance of late-modern life, its interiorized micropolitical emphasis on cultivating an
affirmative sensibility avoids addressing the choices, gaps, and exclusions constituting the space
of politics. The ambiguity of Whites approach, its ambivalent hovering between the affirmation
of late modernity and affirmation as a political practice, is thus indicative of the larger problem
of avoidance. White misses the opportunity to take a side, to offer generosity to practices of
becoming that affirm sustaining life in common and to reject political views anchored in
religious and market fundamentalism.

Accounting for Ourselves

In her Spinoza lectures, Judith Butler considers the conditions under which one gives an
account of oneself.3 There she attends to those prefigurations of language, finitude, and natality
that White understands as weakly ontological. In some ways, these lectures seem like an exercise
in weak ontology insofar as Butler emphasizes the foundering of our attempts to tell our own
stories in order to present a certain ethical disposition in the place of a full and satisfying notion
of narrative accountability (29). Yet, contra White, Butlers considerations of the relationship of
unknowingness to the ethical responsibility of critique demonstrate the political importance of
opacity and limits, of what we might also call the lack or gap forever in need of a supplement,
which holds open the place for futural justice.
Sustaining Affirmation rejects the Derridean idea of futural justice or justice to come. For
White, such an approach shuttles between excoriating critique of an irredeemable present and
messianic appeals to an indefinite, but somehow redemptive future (151). It becomes a site of
normative overload (152), a failure to acknowledge the ontological sources that prefigure

7
ethical and political claims. In contrast, Butler embraces the possibility of hope (18) and the
critical opening in the normative horizon structuring relations of recognition (20). This open,
not-yet-given, incalculable gap is, for Butler, the space of ethics and critique. Without it, the
system would be closed; everything would be calculable. Rather than a site of normative
overload, then, Butlers appeals to justice in the future indicate precisely that open-endedness
necessary for democracy.4
Accordingly, instead of urging an affirmative relation to the world as given, Butler,
commenting on Foucault, holds that ethics undermines its own credibility when it does not
become critique (77). Indeed, her treatment of the conditions under which one gives an account
of oneself makes clear the power relations maintaining any historically instituted order of
ontology (65). In the very moves that might be read as answering White, then, Butler continues
to assert the necessity of a critical, rather than an affirmative engagement with the present, a
critical engagement unpredictable yet necessary for justice to come.
Butlers discussion of giving an account of oneself emphasizes the limits conditioning
any such accounting. These limits include exposure, or our condition of corporeality before
others (as opposed to pure interiority, say) and normativity, or the way that we come into being
within a set of norms that precedes us and remains indifferent to us. Moreover, these limits
exceed any account we can give of ourselves. The fact of our exposure is non-narratable. We
can point to our bodies in certain ways, describe our ailments, and reflect on how our physical
embodiment conditions our being in the world. Yet, our bodies will die and we with them. And,
other than in fiction, we cannot account for our own births and deaths, and this failure, too,
conditions any narration we might give of our lives. Similarly, the norms through which we give
an account of ourselves frame the conditions of our emergence, of our ability to recognize and be

8
recognized. Norms exterior to me are necessary for me to be who I am. Yet, they are necessarily
apart from me and not of my own making. Human being is thus lived at a minimum through two
temporal vectors: the temporality of ones embodied first person perspective and the temporality
of the norm.
For Butler, experiencing the limits of our ability to account for ourselves enables a new
sense of ethics that she speaks of as the acknowledgement of the limits of acknowledgement
itself (33). She writes, It would be perhaps an ethics based on our shared, and invariable,
partial blindnesses about ourselves. The recognition that one is, at every turn, not quite the same
as what one thinks that one is, might imply, in turn, a certain patience for others that suspends
the demand that they be self-same at every moment (33). And, of course, this recognition is
itself necessarily imperfect. Thus, Butler adds that the acknowledgement of the limits of
acknowledgement itself can constitute a disposition of humility, and of generosity, since I will
need to be forgiven for what I cannot fully know, what I could not have fully known, and I will
be under a similar obligation to offer forgiveness to others who are also constituted in partial
opacity to themselves (34). The lack in what we can know about ourselves thus might be
understood as the lack in what others know about themselves. And, although I may often be
tempted to fill in this gap with an always impossible certainty, my ability to cultivate an
awareness of this lack could enable me to be more forgiving of others and perhaps even of
myself. Allowing for openness, not demanding an impossible accounting from another, becomes
here, for Butler, another, better, version of recognition because it recognizes the desire to persist.
Living as a subject split between the norms through which we emerge and the corporeal,
finite life that we lead means that we must become critical. Butler develops this idea as she
rethinks responsibility, arguing that insofar as we remain strangers to ourselves responsibility

9
cannot rest on a myth of transparency but must instead be understood as dependent on the
unknowable, the limit, the trauma within and necessary to me. In making this argument, she
draws from Adornos account of the inhuman as necessary for the human as well as from
Foucaults telling the truth about himself. Crucial to each account is a certain limit, a limit that
conditions the becoming of subjects and reminds us how ethical norms not only guide conduct
but decide who and what is human (65). Persisting in a poorly arranged world poses ethical
dilemmas: our own desires to persist have consequences for others. Although we dont choose
the norms through which we emerge, insofar as we speak within them, or recognize an other in a
way that they frame, we transmit these norms and thus bear a responsibility for their
consequences. To this extent, an ethics that does not involve critique, that does not call into
question these norms and their consequences, is itself unethical, culpable, unresponsive as it
disavows the relations of power on which it depends. And, even as this ethics is prefigured in the
conditions of the scene of address it is nonetheless inseparable from an openness in and to the
future.
The ethical disposition Butler finds in the context of address may arise. Or, it may not.
It may well be the case that sometimes something more is called forjudgment or perhaps even
condemnation. Butler allows for this when she observes that judgment does not exhaust the
sphere of ethics and when she says that judgments are necessary for political life (36). Yet,
Butler holds back, avoiding the political task of condemning those persons and practices, those
norms and desires upon which our poorly arranged world depends. For example, she writes,
. . . condemnation can work precisely against self-knowledge inasmuch as it moralizes a
self through disavowal; although self-knowledge is surely limited, that is not a reason to
turn against it as a project; but condemnation tends to do precisely this, seeking to purge

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and externalize ones own opacity, and in this sense failing to own its own limitations,
providing no felicitous basis for a reciprocal recognition of human begins as
constitutively limited (36).
It isnt clear to me why Butler says this. For surely the fact that condemnation can work against
self-knowledge does not mean that condemnation everywhere and always does so. And surely it
is not always the case that condemnation moralizes a self through disavowal, that it necessarily
seeks to purge and externalize opacity and necessarily fails to own its limitations. Can we not
imagination a condemnation capable of acknowledging its own limits? Can we not imagination a
condemnation born of failure, indeed, a condemnation indebted and responsible to failure?
If I condemn racism, homophobia, or cruelty in another, am I necessarily disavowing
racism, homophobia, or cruelty in myself? Might I not be addressing it in myself as I confront it
in another? Or, better, might I not be calling into question, condemning, practices in which I, as
well as those I condemn, am implicated such that I recognize this condemnation as a selfcondemnation, a condemnation of us and of our practices? And could it not be the case that such
condemnation is my ethical responsibility insofar as it seeks to transform those contexts of
address that will and do exceed my own?
If I condemn someone for pursuing preventive war, or for defending a notion of
preventive war, I need not base this condemnation on a sense that my knowledge is more certain.
Indeed, I can base it on the sense that the pursuer of preventive war aims to produce a future that
I reject or, that even if these are not his aims, that I fear will arise in the course of its pursuit. My
condemnation, again, may be a way of grappling with, of confronting, additional elements of the
contexts of address, elements that involve power, hierarchy, and responsibility for other futures,
other contexts, other beings. Failure to condemn, then, may risk disavowal of relations of power

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as well as confrontation with my own complicity. Rather than a responsive ethics, such failure
may involve a politics of avoidance.
Butler does not always and necessarily avoid condemnation. In fact, important to my
argument is the fact that her ethics need not preclude condemnation and that it can and should be
sharpened so as to account for such divisive, political moments. Yet, it is striking to me that
when Butler does condemn, its as if she finds herself in that moment trapped within a discourse
she rejects, to which she can only gain access through a condemnation. Thus, in Precarious Life,
she condemns on several bases the violence done against the United States and do[es] not see it
as just punishment for prior sins.5 In her analysis of US policies of indefinite detention in
Guantanamo Bay, US violence against Afghanistan, the USs shock and awe attacks on Iraq,
and the Bush administrations hegemonization of political discourse after September 11th in
terms of its own position as victim, however, she does not condemn. Rather, she analyzes,
explains, contextualizes, interprets, interrogates, and, in so doing, critiques. For me this raises the
question of Butlers separation of condemnation and critique and the political place and function
of each.
Butler presumes that condemnation involves closure. That is, she treats condemnation as
unlike other speech acts, as if condemnation were an act of sovereignty already bent on effacing
its own supporting conditions, its own vulnerability and dependence. So even as she recognizes
judging as a mode of address and thus premised on the context of address that can and should
provide a sustaining condition of ethical deliberation, judgment, and conduct, she reads
condemnation as essentially an act of violence, one that erodes the capacity of the addressed
subject for both self-reflection and social-recognition and works to paralyze and deratify the
critical capacities of the subject to whom it is addressed (37). If the condemned is already

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positioned in a prior relation of subordination such erosion and paralysis may result. But not
necessarily. The condemned may reject the bases, the terms, of condemnationI am not who
you say I am or Because I am who you say I am, you are the one who ultimately suffers, who
is left shattered and bereft in condemning me. The condemned may also accept the words of the
condemnation, but challenge the suppositions supporting these words, the suppositions that give
it an ethical valence beyond a mere statement of factYes, I am a godless communist, so?
Condemnation, in other words, may not succeed. Its effects on the addressee as well as its
relation to other acts and interpretations cannot be determined in advance. Likewise, if the
condemned is in fact more powerful, the President of a mighty military power, say, then
associating condemnation with paralysis and deratification surely overstates the power of the
address. One could wish that condemnation had such effects, and with respect to Bushs
unconscionable, immoral, unjustified, illegal, imperialist war against Iraq, I certainly do. Bushs
persistence in his preemptive war against Iraq in the face of the condemnation of millions
throughout the world, however, points to the weakness and inefficacy of condemnation unbacked
by force.
In sum, condemnation is not as powerful and efficacious as Butler implies. And, insofar
as it occurs within a context of address, condemnation is citational, relying for its efficacy on a
set of prior norms that it reiterates, a set of prior practices and values to which it connects.
Condemnation does not occur ex nihilo but is based on something, something shared. As with
other utterances, condemnation is uncontrollable, appropriable, and able to signify otherwise
and in excess of its animating intentions.6 To condemn, then, is to appeal to a prior set of
connections as it basis and thereby to open up this basis for investigation, critique, and,
potentially, condemnation.

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Avoiding Politics
Despite her emphasis on the importance of critique, then, Butlers ethics, like Whites
weak ontology, avoids politics. Just as Whites emphasis on affirming the contestability of ones
own fundaments fail to engage those who like their fundaments, who embrace them, who live by
them, who kill for them, so does Butlers emphasis on the limits at the basis of our ability to give
an account of ourselves format the lack constitutive of the subject as an opacity to be
acknowledged ethically but avoided politically. Moreover, each approach, even as it asserts the
limits of knowledge, the conditions of contingency and unknowingness in which we find
ourselves, seems somehow to presume that such conditions call into question the possibility of
politics. Its as if what the politics of avoidance wants most to avoid is responsibility for actions,
for decisions and condemnations, that will necessarily exceed the aims and intentions of those
who find themselves acting. But politics necessarily entails risking actions whose results cannot
be guaranteed, making decisions and exercising power under conditions where not every option
can be pursued, where some needs will go unaddressed, and where not every value should be
respected or even tolerated. Political decisions, indeed, the very decisions to politicize or to
constitute a space or identity as political, involve determinations of which practices and
principles one wants to further and which one wants to reject.
Butlers account of ethical responsibility is grounded in the human situation of common
vulnerability, exposure, and risk (58). From the outset, she writes, we are implicated in a
mode of relationality that cannot be fully thematized, subject to reflection, and cognitively
known (59). Responsibility stems from an irresolvable unknowability, a trauma that limits and
makes possible our need and capacity for response. Attunement to this unknowingness, this limit
within each of us, is a source of ethical connection as it calls up the ways we are each given over

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to another. Moreover, Butler draws from the analyses of Freud and Nietzsche to reject those
moralizing responses to vulnerability, trauma, and opacity that seek to shield the subject from
pain through appeals to self-defense and recourse to violence. Yet her rejection remains ethical.
That is to say, she offers an alternative response to vulnerability, one that emphasizes our
common place, our common risks, our common limits. But what can be said about a political
response to those who reject this ethics? Who prioritize preservation of a narrowly conceived self
and nation over acknowledgement of common vulnerability? Its almost as if Butlers account of
the context of address presumes an other who shares this context or who can and will accept her
account of it, as if the other answers the call to give an account in necessarily the same way,
without a fundamentally different ethics of his own. But if the subjects self-crafting takes place
always in relation to an imposed set of norms (16) then differing sets of norms will condition
senses of oneself and others and differing ways of conceiving this relation. The risks to which we
find ourselves vulnerable, the experiences of embodiment inflecting our senses of exposure, may
be uncommon: for you, to be in my presence as a menstruating woman may risk defilement; for
me, to confront your jouissance may be unbearable. Once we emphasize such differences, such
conflicts or even antagonisms, politics cannot be avoided. Butler, however, displaces attention
from the political matter of decision as she presents an ethics animated by an appreciation for the
opacity and unknowingness rupturing any expectation to complete coherence or fully transparent
self-identity.
If unknowingness conditions ethics then it necessarily conditions politics as well. Our
political choices, our exclusions, take place under traumatic conditions of unknowability and
unpredictability. Our decision for this rather than that will necessarily involve a kind of violence,
a foreclosure of the possibility of the future that would have resulted had we decided otherwise.

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When we intervene politically, we act within situations not of our own making, often in terms of
representations and practices we might otherwise trouble or critique. Through our actions, we
affect these representations and practices, changing them and ourselves in ways we cannot
predict.
Zizeks account of the Lacanian notion of the act emphasizes precisely this point: in the
act the distance between the ethical and political (the acknowledgement of the limits of
acknowledgement and the necessity of a decision) collapses.7 For Lacan, Zizek explains,
the act is strictly correlative to the suspension of the big Othernot only in the sense
of the symbolic network that forms the substance of the subjects existence, but also in
the sense of an absent originator of the ethical Call, of the one who addresses us and to
whom we are irreducibly indebted and/or responsible, since (to put it in Levinasian
terms) our very existence is responsivethat is to say, we emerge as subjects in
response to the Others Call.8
Butlers ethics is grounded in the way we are given over to the other, in the other as a foreign
kernel of our own being. In a sense, this other part of me is not fully foreign, fully otherhe is
part of me. I imagine him as my equal in the scene of address, we who may recognize each other
and who are somehow each at the mercy of the other (58). We share a symbolic context. In
contrast, the Lacanian act is self-grounding. The act suspends the symbolic network, rupturing
the context of address and erasing the I that I am. Precisely here is the monstrosity of the act:
the context that conditions me and within which I recognize the other is suspended. My relations
are disturbed. In the act, I am not myself. The act is a catastrophe that happens to the me that I
was and the relations in which I found myself. It transforms these relations, changing their terms,
their contours, the very domain of the possible and permissible.9

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White would likely view this emphasis on the act as an instance of normative overload or
an appeal to a messianic future. Yet this view would be mistaken for two reasons. First, the act is
not intentional in any proper sense; it just happens. An act confronts us, we find ourselves in the
position of having no choice but to act and accept full responsibility for our act nevertheless. So
there is no normative overload here. Indeed, the opposite is the case insofar as there is no prior
justification for an act: acts just occur and when they do they change their very contexts of
emergence, the contexts on which justification depends. Second, the notion of the act is not
messianic because from the perspective of what comes before the act, the displacement and
transformation it affects, the dissolution of my sense of who and where I am, is so catastrophic,
that an act necessarily involves the choice of the Worse.10 It involves a kind of selfobliteration, the sacrifice of what is most dear, not as a result of calculation and planning, but in
a free, incalculable move that one has no choice but to do.11 In politics, one does what one has to
do, accepting responsibility, come what may.

Critical Theory Today

The first generation of the Frankfurt School developed critical theory in an effort to
confront and explain fascism. For them, immanent critique was crucial to this project as it
enabled them to work from within what was given to grasp what came to be. At its best,
immanent critique was a practice of finding lost futures in enlightenment, loss possibilities for
meaning and, perhaps, a freer, even reconciled, relation to the world. Whites weak ontology
turns immanent critique into immanent affirmation as it finds in critical approaches to the present
sources that affirm it. The ambiguity that haunts his account of weak ontology contrasts mightily
with the political and ethical positions that gave the Frankfurt theorists their ethical bearings.

17
Could we, should we, imagine a political theory that confronted fascism with nudges,
suggestions, and generosity rather than with complete rejection and opposition?
Unknowingness conditions our politics as well as our ethics. Rather than an ontological
condition somehow compelling us to embrace the contestability and uncertainty of convictions
(as if any ethical or political position could follow directly from such an account) or an ethical
acknowledgement that renders what is unknown to me the same as what is unknown to the other,
in politics unknowingness involves responsibility for that which one cannot but do, for the
exclusions and expulsions necessarily implicated in the exercise of power. Yes, one should be
willing and able to give an account of these decisions, just as one should be willing and able to
condemn and oppose what should be condemned and opposed. Such will, such ability, is crucial
if we are to oppose the market and religious fundamentalism threatening the world today.

Thanks to Paul Passavant and Keith Topper for suggestions on an earlier version of this paper.

1.

The most significant and thorough elaboration of this position comes from William E.

Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and
Why Im Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). See also Romand
Coles, Rethinking Generosity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
2.

Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political

Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

3.

Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself: A Critique of Ethical Violence (Amsterdam:

Koninklijke Van Gorcum, 2003).

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4.

See also Judith Butler, Competing Universalities, p. 261 in Contingency, Hegemony,

Universality, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 2000).
5.

Judith Butler, Precarious Life (New York: Verso, 2004) 40.

6.

Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge,

1997) 98. See also Paul Passavant and Jodi Dean, Laws and Societies, Constellations 8, 3
(November 2001) 376-389.
7.

Zizek writes that the ethical act proper takes place in the intersection of ethics and

politics, in the uncanny domain in which ethics is politicized in its inner most nature, an affair
of radically contingent decisions, a gesture that can no longer be accounted for in terms of
fidelity to some pre-existing Cause, since it redefines the very terms of this Cause, The Fragile
Absolute (London: Verso, 2000) 155.
8.

Slavoj Zizek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001) 161.

9.

See also Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 1999) 374-377.

10.

Ticklish Subject, 377.

11.

Zizek provides the following description of an act: the decision is purely formal,

ultimately a decision to decide, without a clear awareness of what the subject is deciding about;
it is a nonpsychological act, unemotional, with no motives, desires, or fears; it is incalculable, not
the outcome of strategic argumentation; it is a totally free act, although he couldnt do
otherwise, The Puppet and the Dwarf (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003) 22.