ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 demonstrates the requisite approach to rethinking care as contestation. The author clarifies the value fundamentalism at play in certain conceptions of humanitarianism and connects problems in certain iterations of humanitarian care in the E.U. and U.S. to recent scholarship on the threat of nascent fascism in liberal democracies. The author contextualizes the problems, immediately manifest in the manufacturing of terms such as refugee, crisis, and illegal immigrant, and analyzes genealogical work to move beyond the extant value fundamentalism. The aim of this chapter is to undo the specious dichotomies in value theory—such as “good and evil,” “innocent versus guilty,” “us and them”—that become imbricated in humanitarian care. Value fundamentalism relieves individuals and groups of the burden of caring for distant others because it oversimplifies and segregates groups and identities. The author provides detailed information on the motivations, approach, and background for her book’s argument. She discusses the significance of her book for the field and outlines its contributions to the longstanding literature on the intersection of care ethics and justice and for theories of contestation in the aesthetic, ethico-political, and religious domains of human experience. Major authors engaged in this chapter include Richard J. Bernstein and Ágnes Heller.
