ABSTRACT
Ethics, understood as the interrogative practice of that which constitutes our sexed and embodied place in the world, is not positive in the sense of providing rules for action or a blueprint for change. The reader who has been searching for a guide to the good life will not find one here. And this is because, as I have attempted to demonstrate, a positive ethics, which assumes or aims for a common good, can do more harm in a day than any transgressor of a moral code could do in a lifetime. In the midst of complex and fragmentary patterns of modern life, we may desire the stability of a place of our own. And faced with almost invisible forms of injustice we may seek comfort and security in familiar rules and entrenched modes of regulation. Yet such a place is what dreams are made of and such security is assumed at a cost. The regimes of social regulation, which dictate the right way to live, implicitly or explicitly seek to preserve the integrity of every body such that we are compatible with the social body. Not only do these thereby dictate which embodied existences can be transformed by whom and to what end, but, as it is here that comparisons are made and values born, not all bodies are counted as socially viable. In short, the privilege of a stable place within that social and political place we call the ‘common good’ is secured at the cost of denigrating and excluding others.
