Responsibility Beyond Ethics: Vásquez-Arroyo’s Political Responsibility

On April 13, 2018, in what has become a routine practice of American foreign policy, the United States and its allies launched airstrikes in Syria in response to the suspected use of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad’s government. Though the international principle of responsibility to protect (R2P) was not explicitly invoked in this case, the airstrikes—like those launched a year ago—were predicated on the idea that the government’s illegal use of chemical weapons against its own citizens endows the United States and its allies with the responsibility to punish violations of international law even if their own actions violate the rule of law, including the sovereign equality of states and the requirement of Security Council approval for the use of force.

Central to Antonio Vásquez-Arroyo’s project in Political Responsibility: Responding to Predicaments of Power is a dual effort to historicize and critique the mode of responsibility that underwrites this kind of humanitarian intervention while at the same time outlining the conceptual contours of a distinctively political approach to responsibility. Vásquez-Arroyo links a militaristic humanitarianism that “abjures any sense of political responsibility for the destruction enacted” (27) to a broader ethical turn in politics. While a critique of the ethical turn has become a mainstay of political theory, Vásquez-Arroyo argues that “a critical account of the theoretical armature and historical advent of this turn requires more conceptual and historical precision” (28). Historically, he locates the turn in the transatlantic collapse of the insurrectionary politics of 1968, which signaled the decline of Marxism and a resurgent anti-communism (61). Theoretically, Vásquez-Arroyo argues that while the ethical turn is often perceived as an anti-politics, it is “an eminently political strategy” that aims at “neutralization and pacification” (29).

The ethical casting of responsibility as an individual matter—what Vásquez-Arroyo describes as a Kantian “intrasubjectivity”—elides the collective character of political life and eschews our entanglements in structures of power. Emblematic of this approach are the political theories of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, which draw on Levinasian ethics to pose an abstract and pre-political responsibility to the Other (chapter 4). In the case of Butler, for example, a fundamental and universal vulnerability grounds such ethical responsibility. But, as Vásquez-Arroyo notes, such an account obscures the differentiated vulnerability produced through structural relations of race, class, and status (164). Butler’s ethical politics thus reveals the central problem of an ethical approach to responsibility, namely that it is articulated and anchored “in advance of the scenes of power in which encounters with others occur.” As a result, he claims, the Other never appears “with their particular, historical, economic, and political determinations” (148).

Against this mode of ethical responsibility, Vásquez-Arroyo calls for a political ethic that resituates responsibility as a specifically political problem (221). A political ethic is concerned with articulating ethical principles and criteria that are immanent to the field of the political (37, 223). From this perspective an account of political responsibility requires beginning from the intersubjective conditions of collective life and the predicaments of power that pervade and structure the political sphere. In attending to these conditions of political life, a political actor considers “the historically constituted situation in which [she] finds herself, … how it came into being and how the actor in question came to be situated in it, along with the material processes, practices, and discourses mediating her situated actions” (220–221).

On the one hand, this a demanding account of responsibility that calls on political actors to take seriously the ways they are embedded in relations of power and thus engage in a reflective response to the actions done in their name (138). At the same time, political responsibility is attuned to the “external imperatives, limits, and constraints” that mark the “domain of collective life” (136). In this concern with limits, Vásquez-Arroyo’s realist orientation is most explicit...