ABSTRACT
This book explains Walzer's conception of the world as auto-affective, an ontological system underpinned by the self-determining subject. His morality serves as a means to protect internal coherency. The book highlights the problematic incorporation of ethics within the US plan for post-war Iraq. It presents a model of ethics that challenges the ontological primacy of the self that is evident in Walzer's justification of war. The understanding of ethical responsibility is a form of Derridean ethics; yet Derrida's ethics is itself articulated as a response, for example, a response to the work of Plato, Immanuel Kant, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Nancy and others to whom his arguments are indebted. The conception of alterity outlined by Walzer is directly related to Derrida's understanding of the ethical action emphasizes the relationship between death and responsibility. This book primarily focuses on demonstrating the necessity of alterity to explain Walzer's justification of war as a defense of self-determination.
