William
Egginton argues that the notion of the ethical cannot be understood
outside of its relation to perversity—that is, the impulse to do
what one knows and feels is wrong. The allure of the perverse,
moreover, should not be understood as merely the necessary obverse of
ethically motivated behavior; rather, from the perspective of a
psychoanalytic understanding of the ethical, the two drives are
structurally identical. This discovery leads the author to
engagements with deconstructive thought and with contemporary gender
theory. In the first, he shows that the insistent resurgence of the
ethical fault-line inevitably drives even the most stalwart atheism
to a theological moment. In the second, he argues that while “female
philosophy” has successfully repudiated the subject-centered
exceptionalism of “male philosophy,” it is precisely to the
extent that it is understood to offer a kind of release from the
perversity of ethics that it must fail as ethical utterances.