ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 presents the author’s ethical analysis contextualized as always already political. Ethics is defined as self-care and care of the other via contestation as the self-constitution of subjectivity. Recent anthropological and sociological research demonstrates harmful conceptions of the subject endeavoring to help refugees and forced migrants, and the lives of those displaced have been conceived as “the human waste” of civilization. Chapter 3 tackles this double dilemma in a two-fold manner, first by further repudiating value fundamentalism, and second by turning to counter-conducts in the face of governmentality. Counter-conducts establish self-individuation in the context of state-religious authority, a hermeneutical analogue to contemporary ethico-politicized religious authority underlying allegedly secular governments and humanitarian regimes. Chapter 3 concludes that there are practices of choice possible even when there is no freedom or liberty, thus recognizing additional possibilities for contestation such as the movement of refugees and forced migrants as transnational acts of freedom and political assembly. The author argues a form of freedom as a practice of care of the self and other through counter-conducts to political-religious authority. Authors engaged in this chapter include Friedrich Nietzsche, Bonnie Honig, Michel Foucault, Ágnes Heller, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, Miriam Ticktin, and Zygmunt Bauman.
