Ethics after Liberalism
| Author | Rosemary E. Shinko |
| Published date | 01 May 2010 |
| Date | 01 May 2010 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0305829810366474 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
© The Author(s), 2010. Reprints and Permissions:
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Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol.38 No.3, pp. 723–745
ISSN 0305-8298; DOI: 10.1177/0305829810366474
http://mil.sagepub.com
723
Ethics after Liberalism:
Why (Autonomous) Bodies Matter
Rosemary E. Shinko
This article pursues two trajectories of investigation: one which
explores how the construct of autonomy shorn of its liberal sovereign
inheritances could serve as a resource for creative enactments of ‘the
political’; and the other, which takes up the problematic aspects of the
absence of the body in current International Relations scholarship. It
will be argued that a relational version of autonomy is what enables
and sustains the shift from an ethic centred on liberal atomistic selves
to an ethics of engagement between self and other. Engagement, how-
ever, involves bodily enactments and, pace Shapiro, the willingness to
be afflicted by the performance of the other. Thus the crucial aspect of
the body that we must consider is how we might begin to theorise the
body as a surface for the resistance of sovereign power that not only
operates to individuate and separate but to render docile and dis-
ciplined. In the global war on terror, sovereign power’s exercise has
reached its most abstract levels yet, as bodies are disappeared within
increasingly technologised and biologised forms of war. Abstraction
is the key technique that sovereign power wields over fleshy, mate-
rial bodies and it is our responsibility to stop empowering sovereign
power by driving the discourse into ever more abstract lines of argu-
mentation while losing site of the primary resource we wield in this
struggle, the creative and relationally autonomous body.
Keywords: autonomy, body, ethics of encounter, relationality, resistance
This article explores how we can address the lack of theorisation of the
body in International Relations theory. Since this discussion and critique
proceeds from within and against the context of the liberal paradigm,
this article will begin with a brief review of critical engagements with
liberalism to identify what still remains vital in liberal thought.1 Then
1. Barry Hindess, ‘Liberalism: What’s in a Name?’, in Global Governmentality:
Governing International Spaces, eds W. Larner and W. Walters (London: Routledge,
2004), 23–39; ‘The Liberal Government of Unfreedom’, Alternatives 26, no. 2 (2001):
93–111; and ‘Liberalism, Socialism and Democracy, Variations on a Governmental
Theme’, Economy and Society 22, no. 3 (1993): 300–13; Vivienne Jabri, ‘Restyling
the Subject of Responsibility in International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of
International Studies 27, no. 3 (1998): 591–611; and Georg Sørensen, ‘Liberalism of
Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38 (3)
724
Restraint and Liberalism of Imposition: Liberal Values and World Order in the
New Millennium’, International Relations 20, no. 3 (2006): 251–72, provide quite a
detailed and provocative critique levelled at what are regarded as political liber-
alism’s more self-congratulatory pronouncements and its most egregious failings
and inherent limitations.
2. R.B.J. Walker, ‘Gender and Critique in the Theory of International Relations’,
in Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations, ed. V. Spike
Peterson (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992), 199.
3. R.B.J. Walker, ‘Dialogue: Towards a Critical Social Theory of International
Politics’, Alternatives Global, Local, Political 13 (1988): 86.
4. Richard Ashley, ‘The Achievements of Post-Structuralism’, in International
Theory: Positivism and Beyond, eds Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 243.
5. Richard Ashley, ‘Living on Border Lines: Man, Poststructuralism, and War’,
in International/Intertextual Relations, eds James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro
(New York: Lexington Books, 1989), 266.
the discussion will explore the significance of recasting liberal autonomy
in more relational terms as a way to focus attention on the embodied
aspects of the ethical relationships between self and other. The final two
sections will discuss why it is so imperative that we address this lack of
focus on the body and explore ways in which we can begin to theorise the
body as a surface for the resistance of power.
Critical Engagements with Liberalism
As Walker indicates, critical theory does not represent a fundamental dis-
juncture between the modern and the postmodern, rather it signifies an
attempt to ‘work within and against established accounts of what it means
to be human, political, progressive and so on, rather than to renounce all
that has come before as fatally and irretrievably tainted’.2 Thus Walker’s
critique emanates from within liberalism and involves a:
wholesale critique of the philosophy of identity, [critiques] the moment of
unity and the way in which the moment of difference . . . becomes subordi-
nate to unity, [and calls into question the] great dualistic schemas [where] . . .
truth, beauty and goodness reside in the moment of identity, their opposites
with the inferior moment of difference.3
In a critical twist, Ashley argues ‘post-structuralist interventions are frequently
decried as but a canonical series of negations . . . most especially as a denial of
the subject of theory who would also be the subject of emancipatory practice’.4
It is not the subject per se that he objects to, but the way in which the subject
of international politics has been framed as the ‘sovereign’ individual/citizen
of the ‘sovereign’ state. The modern construct of sovereignty ‘invokes a figure
of man who recognizes some specific limitations on his doing and knowing,
not as external constraints, but as virtually constitutive of his autonomous
being as the necessary center of historical narrative’.5
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