ABSTRACT
The renewal of interest in questions of the “ethical” in recent years testifies to the enduring nature of certain philosophical problems. If there has even been a “turn to ethics” in a number of disciplines, this event raises the question of what one turns from in order to arrive at the ethical. I would like to suggest that the inevitable answer to this question, at the present moment, is the political. The turn to ethics is a turn away from the political. Let us admit that to advocate such a turn risks abandoning politics itself to the forces of reaction. The reduction of politics to morality, to the spectacle of a morality play, is just what has occurred in the political public sphere, culminating in the impeachment proceedings of 1999. Discourse in the public sphere often seems driven by the political right, which sees all political questions in terms of an absolutist morality. In the light of this development, any “turn to ethics” must be regarded, at least initially, with suspicion.
