The Poverty of Ethics

Praise

“In today’s confusion, when the lowest form of political opportunism is regularly masked as the appeal to highest ethical principles, Anat Matar’s book sets the record straight. It doesn’t argue for the subordination of ethics to political pragmatism, quite the opposite. It demonstrates how authentic ethics are always grounded in a basic political decision. It is rare that one sees such a combination of progressive political engagement and deepest philosophical reflection as in The Poverty of Ethics. Matar’s book is a guide for all those who are trying to survive with dignity in a topsy-turvy world that is our own.”
—Slavoj Žižek

“An unusually and attractively bold and passionate work that crosses the idioms of Analytical and European Philosophy, challenges the orthodoxies and complacencies of each tradition, while animating the subject of Ethics from within the urgencies of contemporary political debate and action.”
—Akeel Bilgrami, Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University

“A bracing and illuminating challenge to moral philosophy in its many guises. Matar offers philosophers a stark choice: to understand morality through the history and practice of radical left struggle, or to serve as an apologist for the dominant order.”
—Amia Srinivasan

“Philosophy can and should be a crucial component in the toolbox enabling our political struggles, Anat Matar argues compellingly in this elegant, erudite text. Indeed, bringing all her philosophical rigour to the question of the ‘poverty of ethics’, no-one is better placed than Matar to teach us the relevance of committed philosophical reflection to resisting injustice and oppression, situated as she is in the heart of Israel, and a supporter of Palestinian rights. This book is essential reading for all political thinkers and activists.”
—Lynne Segal

“A learned and engaging work. Matar’s greatest achievement in this book is to refute the too-widespread assumption that a ‘Levinasian’ ethics can precede our life with language—with each other, at large. Rather, politics goes all the way down.A powerful antidote to depoliticisations of ethics, a powerful paean to the power of community.”
—Rupert Read, author of Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy