Has Judith Butler been ‘duped by morality’? Although I doubt even the most sceptical among them would put the question in such stark terms, many of Butler's readers have expressed a sense that her work may have taken a wrong turn. Such readers worry that, in her engagement with moral philosophy, and in particular with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Butler has retreated from some of the important political insights of her earlier work in feminist and gender theory. For instance, Lynne Segal finds Butler ‘substituting ethical abstraction for political analysis in some of her recent Levinasian and Arendtian turns’ (2008: 384). For her part, Diana Coole provides a more positive evaluation of Butler's recent work, going so far as to argue that it offers a possible ‘renewal of political engagement’, but quickly adds that ‘pulling against this possibility there is also … the more abstractly normative, Kantian - and recently, Levinasian - aspect of her thinking’ (2008: 27). Moya Lloyd likewise contends that, although Butler departs from Levinas on certain points, ultimately, ‘instead of subjecting to critical scrutiny the [Levinasian] idea of the face as the means by which others make ethical demands on us, Butler simply concurs with it’, to deleterious effect (2008: 103). Levinas himself often contrasts the ethical and the political, and so one can understand the suspicion evinced by many of Butler's readers upon encountering the name Levinas in her work. For these critics, Butler's recent writing has become weighed down by the gravity of moralism.

I read Butler's recent work differently. Certainly, critics have voiced important reservations about Butler's recent work distinct from a concern over its ‘Levinasian’ aspects; however, taking Butler's readings of Levinas as a kind of case study, I use the encounter between these two thinkers as a starting point for reconsidering the relationship between ethics and politics in her work and beyond.