Against War

Nelson Maldonado-Torres argues that European modernity has become inextricably linked with the experience of the warrior and conqueror. In Against War, he develops a powerful critique of modernity, and he offers a critical response combining ethics, political theory, and ideas rooted in Christian and Jewish thought. Maldonado-Torres focuses on the perspectives of those who inhabit the underside of Western modernity, particularly Jewish, black, and Latin American theorists. He analyzes the works of the Lithuanian-born French-Jewish philosopher and religious thinker Emmanuel Levinas, the Martiniquean psychiatrist and political thinker Frantz Fanon, and the Catholic Argentinean-Mexican philosopher, historian, and theologian Enrique Dussel. Considering Levinas' notion of the self in relation to French liberalism and Nazi racial politics, Maldonado-Torres elaborates a "master morality" of dominion and control at the heart of racial policies, imperial projects, and wars of invasion. He refines the outlines of modernity's war paradigm via Fanon's phenomenology of the colonized and racial self. Critiquing Levinas and Fanon, each through the thought of the other, Maldonado-Torres formulates an ethical conception of subjectivity. He draws on Dussel to provide a genealogy of the modern imperial and warring self. Maldonado-Torres' argument culminates in his theorization of race as the naturalization of war's death ethic. With Against War, Maldonado-Torres advances the de-colonial turn, which posits ethics as the primary antidote to problems with Western conceptions of freedom, autonomy, and equality, and insists on the necessity of politics to forge a world where ethical relations become the norm rather than the exception.