The Politics of Care in Habermas and Derrida

The Politics of Care in Habermas and Derrida provides a penetrating analysis of the tensions and possibilities that animate the dialogue between two of the most significant frameworks of moral philosophy in the contemporary Continental tradition. The dispute between Habermasian discourse ethics and Derridean deconstruction is the backdrop for the book's excursus on the problem of care for the "otherness of the other"—a question with profound implications at the level of both ethics and politics. In addressing this problem, the study reaches beyond the idioms of Habermas and Derrida and considers care from a number of divergent vantage points, including feminist theory, ecological ethics, the recognition theory of Axel Honneth, and the perspectives of Frankfurt School writers such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. In its concluding chapter, the book offers an innovative reconstruction of Habermas's discourse-ethical model, which affirms the latter's overarching commitment to the tradition of moral universalism even as it accords due weight to the contravening standpoint of Derrida and kindred exponents of the ethics of care.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary moral and ethical philosophy, especially those concerned with the work of Habermas and Derrida—both as individual thinkers and as philosophical interlocutors.