Ewa Plonowska Ziarek is Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism.

• Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Toward an experimental ethos of becoming: from docile bodies to ethical agency 2. Ethical responsibility, Eros, and the politics of race and rights 3. Toward an ethics of Dissensus: Lyotard's agnostic politics and the pursuit of justice 4. The libidinal economy of power, democracy and the ethics of psychoanalysis 5. Labor of the negative: the impossible ethics of sexual difference and the politics of radical democracy 6. Postmodern blackness/visionary feminism: paradigms of subjectivity, community, and ethics in Bell Hooks's work Afterword Notes Index.

"Ziarek has produced one of the most sensitive, thoughtful, original, and quietly provocative texts I know in the broad areas of contemporary philosophy and sexual and racial politics. . . . Trained in comparative literature and literary studies, she is equally at home in the most difficult and contentious of philosophical texts."—Elizabeth Grosz, State University of New York, Buffalo "Original, carefully argued, and beautifully written, this book is one of the first sustained attempts to think through the relationship between feminist ethics and feminist politics. Ziarek's nuanced readings of central figures in current debates in postmodern ethics provide not only new ways of interpreting their work but also new directions for ethical theory."—Kelly Oliver, SUNY-Stony Brook "An Ethics of Dissensus brings together the work of some of the most influential poststructuralist and postmodernist theorists to develop a link between their models of the fragmented subject and ethics of alterity (that values radical difference) and their implications for the political and ethical inetractions among internally diverse and mobile groups in democratic societies. This book should prove particularly illuminating to literary critics and philosophers who are interested in seeing how postmodern ethics can be transformed to suit the needs of feminist theory and politics."—Comparative Literature