| This dissertation critiques and supplements current antifoundationalist approaches to ethics, in particular those of Richard Rorty and Bernard Williams. It argues that by failing to account for the conditions by which ethical contingency is possible, these philosophers unwittingly replicate the same metaphysicalist assumptions they denounce in traditional ethical philosophies. Through close readings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, I contend that an ethics of contingency requires that we interpret value in terms of a notion of power. In consequence, evaluations of practices would function as strategic rather than determinate, arising in conjunction with an ontological determination of the essence of those practices. An ethics of contingency, then, presupposes a reading of truth and value as mutually constitutive. This allows investigations tracing the contingency of dominant and subjugated values to be conducted along the lines of Foucauldian genealogies.; In subsequent chapters, I analyze the work of Frantz Fanon in order to argue that bodies, as well as practices, come under ethical scrutiny. Thus, the production of an ethical subject yields as well an ethical body, which is to say that the body is always value-laden territory. Finally, I consider Derrida's contention that ethics does not sustain absolute justifications of practices, but only contingent and equivocal ones. Ethical contingency, I conclude, authorizes evaluation, but not the conviction required for a categorical endorsement or condemnation of particular acts. |
