The aim of this paper is to explore the ethical possibility of rethinking the role of care and human bonds outside a patriarchal framework. First of all, I revise some philosophical understandings of friendship that havemaintained that women were incapable of it. Equality and symmetry were the requirements for friendship and the subordinated status of women in history was the fact that had made impossible for them to aspire to the moral excellence of philía. Secondly, I analyze the gender subtext (...) of the idea of autonomy to show that have been constructed by masculine patterns, specially, when it dismiss the constitutive fact of human interdependence. Finally, I focus on the last contributions of feminist bioethics to reflect about the need of conceiving autonomy in a framework of relationships and mutual obligations of care. This opens the possibility of recovering a new sense of a autonomy , that is coherent with the moral experience of women, focused on care, and this relational autonomy seems to me a essential point of depart to rethinkmany of the current bioethical debates. (shrink)

This article attempts to chart a course beyond the 'impasse of the political' in Derridean deconstruction that avoids both the ontologization of ethics in Levinas and the recourse to morality in Habermasian discourse ethics. Instead, it presents an account of the decision in a terrain of undecidability through the concept of affinity. This mode of ethico-political activity, when combined with Foucault's analytics of power and Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis, provides the outlines of a project of radical social transformation that could (...) achieve greater nuance with regard to 'actually existing' democracy and justice than has so far been achieved within deconstructive political theory. At the level of social structure, such a project is commensurate with a move away from subject positions associated with the system of liberal-capitalist nation-states, in favour of identifications produced by a locus of 'coming' communities. Key Words: affinity • Critchley • deconstruction • Deleuze and Guattari • Derrida • ethics • Foucault • Laclau and Mouffe • politics. (shrink)