“Keenan’s book sets the record straight once and for all. The absence of unambiguous universal standards is the precondition of ethical responsibility; it forces us to engage ourselves fully, without any metaphysical alibi. The lesson of deconstruction is not that we are not responsible since we are merely ‘spoken by’ the Text, but, on the contrary, that every apparently neutral position already hinges on an unacknowledged ethico-political choice. For that reason, Fables of Responsibility is infinitely more important than a scholarly treatise on literature and politics. It proposes an answer to today’s fundamental ethical problem; how is ethics possible in the disenchanted, post-metaphysical universe of contingency and finitude?”
– Slavoj Žižek, Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana
“Keenan responds to the most urgent and vexed questions raised by the practice of reading, that of responsibility itself. In a subtle, sustained, and brilliant engagement, he offers a reformulation of ethical and political demands made by reading that are not reducible to easy imperatives. The return to Marx astonishes and promises, a clear tour de force.”
– ]udith Butler, University of California, Berkeley
“This brilliant and lucid book, impeccably documented, begins with a theory of reading and ends with a stunning analysis of the conditions for political action. On the way it relates deconstructive ethical thinking to literature and politics in an unprecedented manner, illuminating all three. The readings of Marx, Foucault, and Aesop would themselves be enough to recommend Fables of Responsibility.”
– Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University
