ABSTRACT
The subject is central to any discussion of the ethical. Indeed, it allows the possibility for the representation of ‘something’ or ‘someone’, acting responsibly, hospitably or ethically. In this vein, Maja Zehfuss notes that we cannot judge the ethics of the 2003 invasion of Iraq without fi rst questioning the prior existence, independence and invulnerability of the ‘we’, separate from a ‘them’, that claimed the right to invade.1 The possibility of ethics is necessarily premised upon the existence of a coherent subject. Importantly, however, foreign policy has become ‘an arena of practice in which some subjects emerge with the status of actors’ and others do not.2
