ABSTRACT
Ethics, venerable philosophical discourse though it be, is for me questionable in the extreme, questionable to the point that I have, God help me, taken a stand against ethics.2 If ethics is the land of law and universalizability, of rule and normativity, be they natural laws or deontological duties, rules of pure reason or matters of moral feeling, the issue of the Form of the Good or only of utilitarian advantage, then, alas, I must say-hier stehe ich-I am against ethics. Ethics is for me highly questionable. To rewrite ever so slightly the saying of a famous man, ethics is something to be deconstructed, while obligation in itself, if there is such a thing, is not deconstructible. For obligation transpires in a realm of radical singularity, where every hair on our head, every tear, has been counted. Obligationthe unconditional hospitality owed to the other-is the ethical beyond ethics, the ethical without ethics, the hyper-ethical, the fine point of the ethical soul, the very ethicality of ethics, but always without and against ethics. For ethics stops short with the law or rule while everything that exists is a singularity of which the coarse lens of the law cannot quite catch sight.
