About The Ethics of Resistance:

Opening a new debate on ethical reasoning after Kant, Drew Dalton addresses the
problem of the absolute in ethical and political thought. Attacking the foundation
of European philosophical morality, he critiques the idea that in order for ethical
judgement to have any real power, it must attempt to discover and affirm some
conception of the absolute good. Without rejecting the essential role the absolute
plays within ethical reasoning, Dalton interrogates the assumed value of the
absolute.

Dalton brings some of the most influential contemporary philosophical traditions

into dialogue with each other: speculative realists like Badiou and Meillassoux;
phenomenologists, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas; German Idealists,
especially Kant and Schelling; psychoanalysts Freud and Lacan; and finally, post-
structuralists, specifically Foucault, Deleuze, and Ranciere. The relevance of these
thinkers to concrete socio-political problems is shown through reflections on the
Holocaust, suicide bombings, the rise of neo-liberalism and neo-nationalism, as
well as rampant consumerism and racism.

This book re-defines ethical reasoning as that which refuses absolutes and resists
what Milton's devil called in Paradise Lost the “tyranny of heaven.” Against
traditional ethical reasoning, Dalton sees evil not as a moral failure, but as the
result of an all too easy assent to the absolute; an assent which can only be
countered through active resistance. For Dalton, resistance to the absolute is the
sole channel through which the good can be defined.

Reviews:
“Through a sharp reading of the ethics foregrounding most contemporary
western thought and philosophy's relationship with the absolute, Dalton finds the
point where ethical thought falls into nihilism or, even worse, outright fascism.
Dalton goes on to outline an “ethics of resistance” that pulls away from the
tyranny of the absolute.” – Dylan Trigg, FWF Lise Meitner Senior Fellow,
Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Austria.

“Dalton does a great job of writing clearly about very difficult philosophers. This is
an important book for anyone interested in the source of fanaticism.” – Paul
Cliteur, Professor of Jurisprudence, Leiden University, The Netherlands.

“A radical re-reading of evil in relation to ethics, which carries with it a powerful

argument against the seduction of the absolute; the writing style is forceful and
animated without being hyperbolic. This is an original contribution to the field of
contemporary continental philosophy.” – William Watkin, Professor of
Contemporary Philosophy and Literature, Brunel University, UK.
Table of Contents:
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION: The Failure of Ethics in the West
A History of Collaboration
Ethics Reenvisioned
PART ONE: THE TYRANNY OF THE ABSOLUTE
1 - The Trouble with Post-Kantian Ethics: Alain Badiou and Quentin
Meillassoux on the Vicissitudes of Ethical Absolute
The Ironic Antinomies of Post-Kantian Ethical and Political
Thought
The Limits of Liberalism
The Dogmatic Structure of Nationalism
Alain Badiou and the “Smug Nihilism” of Post-Kantian
Ethics
The Ethics of Fidelity
Quentin Meillassoux on the Rise of Post-Critical Fanaticism
Factial Speculation and Radical Contingency
The Fragility of Meillassoux’s Hope
The Trouble with Speculative Ethics
2 - Phenomenology, Ethics, and the Other: Rediscovering the
Possibility of Ethical Absolutes with Husserl, Heidegger, and
Levinas
Phenomenology’s Problem
Edmund Husserl’s Reduction
The Radical Foundations of the Phenomenological
Revolution
Emmanuel Levinas and the Possibility of Phenomenological
Ethics
Martin Heidegger and Primal Ontology
Levinas and the Ethical Primacy of the Other
Shame and the Other
Responsibility and Ethical Subjectivity
Phenomenology and the Absolute
3 - The Problem of the Other: Levinas and Schelling on the
Reversibility of Ethical Demand
The Face of the Other as Absolute Phenomena
Absolute and the Infinite
Levinas’s God?
The Ethical Value of Levinas’s Absolute
The Ambiguity of the Infinite
Schelling and the Absolute Reality of Good and Evil
The Reversibility of Good and Evil in the Absolute
The Other as Absolute Ground for Good AND Evil
INTERLUDE - Sympathy for the Devil: The Tyranny of Heaven
The Evil of Acquiescence
Kierkegaard’s Apologetics for Murder
A Report on the Banality of Evil Revisited
The Tyranny of Heaven

PART TWO: THE ETHICS OF RESISTANCE

4 - Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In! Jacques Lacan and the Ethics of
Psychoanalysis
The Radical Power of Lacan’s Thought
Unconsciousness Unsettled
The Alterity of the Other
Desire for the Other
The Subversion of the Subject
The Other / Thing
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis
5 - Carving a Space of Freedom: Michel Foucault and the Ethics of
Resistance Michel Foucault and the Exigency of Ethical Resistance
The Uses of Genealogy
The Modern Subject – Governmentality, Normalization,
and Bio-power
The Trouble with Modern Subjectivity and the Ethics of
Resistance
Ethics as Care for the Self
Technologies of Care
Care for the Self in Relation to the Absolute Other
CONCLUSION - The Ethics of Resistance: A Backward-Turning Relation
Ethics and the Absolute
Backward-Turning Relation
Politics as First Philosophy
The Political Ends of Anarchy
The Ethics of Ab-archy
 INTRODUCTION

The failure of ethics in the West

A history of collaboration
The history of ethics in the West is a history of collaboration—a history of assent and affirmation.
It is the history of the varied attempt to identify some idea of an absolute good and to define the
various means by which one may live perfectly in accordance with it. Virtue belongs, according
to this story, to the one who both knows the absolute and has the courage and constancy to act
appropriately: to submit themselves to it willingly, fully, and constantly. Whether conceived of as
an eternal god, universal maxim, or maximization of happiness or defined as the product of divine
revelation, rational deduction, or moral calculation, the origin and apogee of ethical thinking in the
West has always figured as a kind of moral yea-saying to some absolute good—an intellectual and
practical acquiescence to some conceived supreme value. So it is that the history of ethical
philosophy in this tradition takes on the image of an angelic chorus: the voices of its authors filling
the annals of religious dogma and rational intellection alike with the echo of a million “amens.”
“Let the absolute reign, forever and ever,” they sing. “Let it be in our minds and in our actions, on
earth as it is in the heavenly realms of thought.”
Evil within this narrative has received the lesser part. Cast as a form of moral failure by the
philosophers of the West, evil has rarely been granted its own ethical power. Instead, it has been
placed in the subordinate position: defined not as a moral force in its own right, but as the
perversion, rejection, or negation of the moral force of the absolute. As such, evil has been
traditionally portrayed in the West as the consequence of an inability or unwillingness within a
moral subject to submit to the natural right or sovereign power of the good, either due to blind
ignorance, gross incompetence, or idiotic refusal. In this tradition, evil has taken on the guise of a
purely negative force: nothing more than a kind of petty and ultimately futile resistance to,
rebellion against, or dissent from the absolute power of the good. In contrast to the “yea-saying”
moralists then, the agents of evil have been caricatured in the West as a set of puerile “nay-sayers,”
epitomized in the portrayal of the devil in various Christian mythologies and depicted in the book
of Jeremiah in the Latin Vulgate crying out “Non serviam”—“No, I refuse. I will not serve nor
1
obey the edicts of the absolute.”
But what has this history of ethical thought wrought? What practical benefit has been
accomplished by the yea-saying attendants of the idea of the absolute? The kingdom of heaven on
earth? Immanuel Kant’s perpetual peace? Jeremy Bentham’s happiness? No, none of these.
Instead, a variety of totalitarianisms set up in the name of some form of absolute justice, purity,
power, or security, at least two global wars waged to end all wars and secure perpetual peace, the
North Atlantic Slave Trade, the Armenian Genocide, the Shoah, Srebrenica, and countless other
massacres. Was all this demonstrative evil little more than the product of some “lesser part” within
us? Was all this suffering nothing more than the result of a moral reluctance within our nature,
some unwillingness within us to submit fully or bow appropriately to the absolute good? Can it be
that the abject horror of human history is simply the result of something missing from our hearts
or minds—some flawed conscience, or perhaps some collective idiocy, weakness, or innate
wickedness which has prevented us from affirming wholly the absolute good and joining the
morally upright yea-saying philosophers of history? Can it be that the profound suffering of the
other which cries out to us from the pages of human history is really nothing more than the effect
of something negative within us—some ethical deprivation which operates at the core of our
being? Perhaps.
Perhaps the moralists of the West are right. Maybe we are all “conceived in wickedness” and
“born into sin,” as the Psalmists wrote and the Evangelists snarl. Perhaps we are in fact structurally
limited by the frailty of our finitude, destined to always fall short of the absolute: capable only of
knowing it dimly and acting halfheartedly in its name. Or perhaps, more hopefully, we simply
have not applied ourselves fully to the task yet. Maybe if only we were to redouble our efforts to
be good, to know the absolute fully and realize its order completely, we could finally make a
heaven for ourselves here on earth, as individuals, as a polis, and eventually as a planet. But, then
again, perhaps the moralists of the West are wrong. Perhaps all the evil we have known is not the
result of some “lesser part,” some moral failure to attain the absolute, but something else entirely.
What if it is the inverse that is true? What if the evils of human history are not the result of
something negative within us, something which refuses or resists the absolute? What if, in fact,
they are the result of that within us which is most positive: our very pursuit of the absolute good?
What if the root of human suffering does not lie in something missing from us, but in something
present within us? What if evil emerges from our very conception and pursuit of the good as an
absolute? Could it be that the history of ethical philosophy in the West has not only been wrong,
it has been an accomplice to, and perhaps even the cause of, evil? The aim of this book is to explore
this possibility and to suggest an alternative to the dominant narrative maintained by the moral
“yea-sayers” of Western philosophy.

Ethics reenvisioned
My goal is to prove two things. First, I want to show that determinate evil action is not ultimately
the result of a privation of or derivation from some absolute good within us; but, more often than
not, it is the result of precisely the opposite: namely, the attempt to realize the good as an absolute,
a status which, as I will show, allows for the justification of virtually any action in its name, no
matter how manifestly terrible. In pursuit of this goal, I will show that many of the most horrifying
atrocities in the political history of the West are not ultimately the result of some dissent from the
good, however perverse, but much more often the effect of a casual, well-intended, and even at
times well-reasoned assent to some idea of an absolute good. In this way I hope to prove the old
maxim which marks the perfect as “the enemy of the good” to be more true than ever before
imagined. In fact, as I will show, the concept of perfection found in the idea of the absolute good
is, more often than not, the ultimate ground of and condition for evil.
The second goal of this book is to redefine ethical reasoning in light of this claim as a form of
resistance to any idea of an absolute good. It is my aim to reclaim the defiant resistance announced
in the demonic non serviam decried by the moralists of the West as the only means by which any
actual good can be preserved and pursued in the real world. Such a persistent resistance, I will
argue, is the only ethical maxim we should strive to emulate in our thought and action alike.
Note that it is not the aim of this book to deny the existence of absolutes in toto. Nor is it to
argue that we should rid ourselves of the absolute in order to pursue the good. My aim here is not
to kill the gods of the morally upright philosophers, deny their power, nor call for their excision
from ethical reasoning. To the contrary, I hope to affirm the power of the absolutes they tout.
Indeed, as I will argue, the idea of the absolute is not only inescapable, it is in fact necessary in
order to found and justify any practical ethics. But, as I will show, the value such absolutes hold,
acting as the foundation for moral judgment, must be reevaluated. It is the aim of this book to alter
the register in which we speak of the absolute in ethical philosophy. It is my aim to transmute the
value traditionally attributed to the absolute, from good to evil; and, on the basis of that revaluation,
I aim to establish a new model of ethical reasoning which defines the good as emergent from
determinate resistance to the lure of the absolute.
To achieve these goals, I must first address and dispel a common misconception within
contemporary philosophical circles: namely, that the question of the absolute is passé—that, in the
words of Friedrich Nietzsche, “God is dead.” This has been the tacit assumption of contemporary
philosophers for the last two centuries: that the idea of the absolute is no longer of concern for
serious philosophers. Since Immanuel Kant’s critique of dogmatic metaphysics, such questions
have been assumed to be the exclusive domain of the ideological or the uneducated. Indeed, the
aim of ethical philosophers since Kant has been to identify and detail various modes of moral
reasoning which do not invoke the absolute as an actual and universal power. Hence, the birth of
ethics as deontological reasoning, moral calculation, and more recently deconstructive openness.
In order for my aims to be achieved then, I must first show, in contrast to this assumption, that the
idea of the absolute, as the ground and aim of ethical reasoning, is still very much alive in the West
after Kant. I must show, in other words, that Nietzsche was wrong: that God, as the idea of the
absolute, is in fact not dead, but is rather still very much alive in contemporary Western ethical
thinking. Moreover, I must show that this “God” lies hidden precisely where we would least expect
to find him, even in those political and ethical philosophies which have grown from the Kantian
critique and the Nietzschean pronouncement of the death of God as a universal and actual absolute.
Only by first revealing the absolutes hidden within such projects can we understand how very
present “God” still is with us today, and how this idea in turn functions to ground very real social
and political evils. This is the task of the first chapter of this book.
There we will examine two contemporary attempts to reframe ethical thought in the wake of the
so-called “death of God.” The aim of this examination is to show that even among those most
committed to the project of thinking of the good outside the bounds of the absolute, the absolute
still manifests as an end to be affirmed; and, inasmuch as it does, it gives way to any number of
concrete and practical ethical and political problems. To make this case, Chapter 1 will examine
the ethical works of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux, respectively, both of whom
forthrightly attempt to diagnose the problem of the absolute in ethical thinking after Kant and
propose a solution to it. Unfortunately, as we will see in detail there, the solutions proposed by
both thinkers are not without their own catastrophic problems. The nature of these problems will
allow us to conclude that a new approach to the nature and role of the absolute within ethical
deliberation must be developed if we are to overcome the horrors of the past. Such a project
requires, however, first acknowledging the necessary function of the absolute as a ground for
ethical deliberation. Moreover, it requires discovering a universal and actual absolute which does
not reassert the kind of dogmatism thankfully laid to rest by Kant’s critique. Only once this task is
accomplished can our larger goal to reevaluate the value of the absolute begin.
Chapter 2 responds to this challenge by detailing how a new nondogmatic account of a
simultaneously universal and actual absolute can be discovered within the phenomenological
tradition, specifically within the account of the Other presented in the work of Emmanuel Levinas.
To examine the nature of this absolute, we will begin there by tracing the genealogy of the idea of
the Other qua absolute within the history of phenomenology, beginning with the work of Edmund
Husserl, proceeding through the thought of Martin Heidegger, and arriving finally at the ethical
analyses of Emmanuel Levinas. Then, through a detailed analysis of Levinas’s work, we will
discover how the idea of the Other can serve as a simultaneously universal and actual absolute
ground for ethical thought without falling into vicissitudes which arise from the Kantian critique.
This chapter concludes by suggesting that the demands levied by the Other as detailed by Levinas
can function as a new absolute ground upon which to establish ethical deliberation anew. But, as
will become clear in Chapter 3, this solution to the problem of contemporary ethics comes at the
cost of the long-held belief in the inherent goodness of the absolute. Indeed, as we will see there,
this solution can only be taken, as I have already suggested, if the value of the Other qua absolute
is radically reevaluated.
 To see how this must be the case, Chapter 3 reveals how Levinas’s account of the Other qua
absolute is not a force to be casually acquiesced to, as is assumed by his most committed readers;
but is in fact a force which should be scrupulously interrogated and diligently resisted. Chapter 3
argues that despite Levinas’s earnest attempts to found in the Other an absolute ground for ethical
responsibility to be heeded and obeyed, what he inadvertently, albeit serendipitously,
accomplishes is precisely the opposite: namely, to define an absolute which functions as the actual
ground for determinate evil. In other words, what Chapter 3 shows is that while we can use
Levinas’s account of the Other as a universal and actual absolute upon which to establish ethical
deliberation anew after Kant, it is not an absolute which we should deem wholly good nor strive
to obey completely. In order to make this point all the more clear, Chapter 3 will conclude with a
brief survey of the work of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, who identifies in his analysis of
the power of the absolute what he termed the “reversibility” of good and evil. So it is in Chapter 3
that the first aim of this book is finally accomplished: that is, the identification of a present and
active absolute moral force upon which to ground ethical deliberation after Kant, only no longer
as a telos to be attained, but as lure to be resisted. As we will see there, the absolute ground for
ethical deliberation present in the demands of the Other give rise to the possibility of the good only
inasmuch as they are resisted. If they are obsequiously obeyed, the demands of the Other function
as the absolute ground and condition for the possibility of evil. This realization allows us to turn
from the first of our goals, to the second: the articulation of a new conception of ethical deliberation
qua resistance to the demands of the absolute.
The urgency and exigency of the need to develop an ethics of resistance against the demands of
the absolute Other will be expounded upon in an interlude separating the first three chapters and
the remaining three. The aim of this interlude is to demonstrate all the more clearly the necessity
of cultivating a new mode of ethical thinking in relation to the absolute. There the concrete dangers
of this ethical reversibility within the Other qua absolute will be detailed by reevaluating two
particularly poignant moments within the history of Western philosophy where the idea of the
absolute good faltered rather tellingly. The first of these moments will be excavated from the work
of Søren Kierkegaard, the second from the thought of Hannah Arendt. In this interlude we will
discover how, contrary to the expressed aims of these thinkers, the reversibility of the demands of
the Other, qua absolute good, is all the more apparent—how, in other words, the good of the Other,
when absolutized, reverts immediately to evil. To make this danger all the more clear, this interlude
will show how actual manifestations of evil in human history, from suicide bombings to the Shoah,
have all been grounded upon and justified in the name of some concept of an absolutized good. In
this way, the aim of this interlude is to show all the more clearly what is at stake in the second half
of the book: the necessity of defining ethical action as a form of resistance against the absolute
demands of the Other. It is to this latter task that the remaining chapters of the book will be
dedicated.
We will begin this task in earnest in Chapter 4 by examining the psychoanalytic work of Jacques
Lacan. There, through an analysis of Lacan’s account of the genesis of the subject, we will see
how various forms of pathology, and what Lacan unambiguously called evil, can result from an
inappropriate relation to any Other which bears the status of an absolute. In light of this danger we
will explore what Lacan termed “the ethics of psychoanalysis,” an ethics which, he argued, can
only be pursued by learning to say “no” to the lure of the absolute Other and by subsequently
cultivating a set of practices which can embolden the subject to hold its own against the inherent
threats posed by the Other.
Chapter 5 will develop Lacan’s idea of the ethical necessity of “no-saying” by way of the late
work of Michel Foucault. There we will not only find a further articulation of the inescapable
dangers inherent to the perception of the Other as an absolute ethical force; we will also discover
a number of strategies aimed at cultivating an ethics of resistance within contemporary
subjectivity. In this way, we will discover in Chapter 5 a means of pursuing practically an ethics
of resistance via what Foucault termed the “technologies” associated with appropriate “care for
the self.”
 The book will conclude with a final chapter which draws from a number of classical and
contemporary sources in order to help the reader reimagine how ethical deliberation could be
pursued as a form of ethical resistance to the absolute Other. There, through an analysis of the role
of political philosophy in ethical thinking, we will gain an even more precise understanding of
how to accomplish practically an ethics of resistance and how such an ethics might be used to
counter the imminent threat of evil present in the contemporary social and political scene.
It is my profound conviction that for any ethics to be truly worthy of its name, a project earnestly
devoted to the pursuit of the good and the defiance of evil, it must begin with the recognition that
any number of absolutes announce themselves in the world around us today. Each of these
absolutes are presented with the weight and power of a demand issued in the name of some Other.
Ethical deliberation must begin by evaluating the demands of these absolute Others. This requires
the counterintuitive recognition that each of these demands, by virtue of their status as absolute,
has the potential of inadvertently leading to evil when obeyed too faithfully. For ethical philosophy
to proceed it must acknowledge this possibility and its resulting conclusion: that ethical action may
require active resistance to the demands of every absolute. Unfortunately, this has not yet been the
case within ethical philosophy in the West. For ethical philosophy to continue to have any
relevance in the contemporary world it must renounce its traditional allegiance to the absolute
without denying the role such absolutes play as the ground and condition for universal and
actualizable ethical judgments. It is the task of ethical philosophers today to recognize that in order
for the good to be defined, the absolute must be acknowledged as a force to be resisted. To
accomplish this task we must begin by accepting that every absolute demand glowers with the
fearsome potential of justifying virtually any act, even murder and genocide, in its name. Only by
acknowledging this fact can those committed to ethical action attempt to articulate the concrete
and practical means necessary to resist such potentially evil injunctions and secure the good.
The task of the first half of this book is to identify and reevaluate the absolute ground of ethical
deliberation as a force which does not call for affirmation, for saying “yes, thy will be done,” but
which requires resistance, which requires defiantly shouting “No, non serviam! I will not be
complicit in your agenda.” Having shown how the demands of the Other arise and operate within
lived experience as an absolute, and how such demands ground and condition the possibility of
evil, the second half of this book aims to detail a set of practices which may be useful for
establishing such an ethics of resistance. One need not restrict oneself to the set of practices
detailed here, however. To the contrary, it is my hope that this book will inspire the expression of
any number of concrete, particular, and specific acts of political and ethical resistance, all equally
suspicious of whatever Other invokes its power in the readers’ life to solicit his or her absolute
allegiance. In the words of Chairman Mao “may a thousand flowers bloom. Let a hundred schools
of thought contend”; and may each of them grow from the recognition that the demands of every
absolute must be resisted.