Violence and singularity: Thinking politics otherwise with Rorty, Kierkegaard, and Levinas

In this dissertation, I engage Richard Rorty's claim that Levinas and Kierkegaard are irrelevant to contemporary politics because of their specifically "religious" orientation. It is my contention that Levinas and Kierkegaard are not politically irrelevant, but actually provide the conditions under which political criticism is possible in the name of justice. The key contribution that they both offer is a distinction between ethics and politics. Ethics is best understood as the fact of infinite obligation to the Other as constitutive of subjectivity. Politics, alternatively, is the reality of multiple Others and, as such, the political realm is defined by an ethical task. I argue that due to the "relational ontology" offered by Kierkegaard and Levinas in which the self is defined by ethical obligation, critique is possible as a form of speaking truth to power in the name of the others who are excluded from power itself. The political result of this ontological narrative is what I call a "recursive hermeneutics" in which the task of interpretation never ends, but rather continues to demand that our political instantiation of justice is never just enough. I suggest that this hermeneutic project yields a strong defense for a democratic politics because of democracy's openness to a constant self-critical enterprise. The deconstructive political theory that results is advocates what Jacques Derrida terms a "democracy to-come" as a regulative ideal that continues to contest the adequacy of any particular historical manifestation of democracy. In the Epilogue, I go beyond a merely critical component and, therefore, offer the outlines of a positive political vision from within the Levinasian/Kierkegaardian framework. Borrowing the idea of "postmodern saints" from Edith Wyschogrod, I argue that the best place to look for guidance in ethico-political life is by looking to the lives of those "ethico-political exemplars" that perform the tension between ethics and politics.