Beyond Sovereignty: A New Global Ethics and Morality

"Beyond Sovereignty is a splendid new step in the scintillating trajectory of thought that has been traced out by D.G. Leahy over the past several decades. With a systematic rigor not seen in American philosophy since Peirce, Leahy sets out his vision of the fourfold structure of ethics—a vision at once convincing and original. In so doing, he shows the relevance of his thinking to contemporary figures such as Levinas, Agamben, and Badiou.  Altogether an astonishing achievement."

                                               Edward S. Casey

"D.G. Leahy’s philosophical work goes beyond the merely radical, opting for an absolutely new departure, an 'essentially new form of thinking' as we enter the third millennium. Its signature feature is that thinking is weaned of every last vestigial attachment to modern subjectivity, eliminating wholesale the grip of the Cartesian-Kantian-Hegelian legacy. This utter elimination of subjectivity is an innovation of such immense consequence that an entirely new approach to ethics becomes imperative: there is need for an ethics absolutely without self, entirely beyond the notion of self-consciousness, entirely beyond the logic of Same and Other. Beyond Sovereignty articulates this absolutely new beginning for ethics. Now that existing is understood to be an essentially creative mode of being, ethics is concerned with love that actually creates the other."

"Beyond Sovereignty is a radically new and truly profound revolutionary ethics, one reversing every manifest ethics so as to create ethics as an embodied omnipotence, as that Good creating the world here and now. While this book deeply engages contemporary philosophy, it is far more fundamentally an absolutely new philosophical theology, and one realizing that Godhead which is an absolute and total creativity."

                                                 Thomas J.J. Altizer 

This book presents a new understanding of ethics and morality grounded in an essentially new form of thought for the first time altogether beyond modern self-consciousness.  In the context of a careful critique of the relevant thinking of Badiou  and Agamben, the writer articulates an understanding of ethics and morality alternative to the otherwise highly creative extensions           of modern consciousness embodied in the works of these authors.  Opting for direct quotation rather than paraphrase, he shows in  fine detail the limits of these most recent forms of self-referential thinking, contrasting them at every step with what he calls “the thinking now occurring for the first time.”  The exposition of the new ethics, developed in contrast to Badiou’s “ethic of   truths,” is accompanied by a table summarizing its logical structure in the form of an “Index of the Ethic of Simplicity,” which contains, among other things, pointers, historical and otherwise, to other domains of thought.  Likewise, prior to its intricate ontological exposition, the “Morality of the New Beginning” is first laid out in the form of a table containing an Ennealogue of the moral imperatives for the new world reality, at once synoptically related to commandments of the Old Testament and the precepts of Jesus. 

Contents

Preface                                                                                                                              

I      Incarnation: Essential Conception of Existing

        The Global Imperative to Begin to Exist                                                                     

II     Omnipotence Nimble: The Ethic of Simplicity

        1   The Question of Ethics                                                                                         

        2   Ethic of Simplicity                                                                                                

        3   Good and Evil                                                                                                    

III   Beginning Now: The Creating Society

        1   Beyond Beyond X                                                                                              

        2   Creating Society                                                                                                  

        3   Morality of the New Beginning                                                                          

Appendices

        1   The Person as Absolute Particular                                                                      

        2   Categories and Relations of Persons                                                                  

        3   Whether Evil Creates the New World                                                               

        4   The Scriptural Understanding: Omnipotence Ceasing Completely

             Works Absolutely                                                                                              

Backnotes 

      1        Note to Faith and Philosophy Further to the Ontology of Real Trinary
      Logic

 

2        Beyond the Good: Not Hither the Good (& Not Hither Beyond the Good)     

 

      3        The Real Beyond the Void: the Beginning/the Power Body                            

 

      4        The Simplicity & Syntax of the Concepts, Immediacy, Mediation,

            Omnipotence, & Beginning  

 Index              

D.G. Leahy is the author of The Cube Unlike All Others; Faith and Philosophy: The Historical Impact; Foundation: Matter the Body Itself; and  Novitas Mundi: Perception of the History of Being.  He is formerly Research Consultant to the Skin Sciences Institute, Children's Hospital Research Foundation, University of Cincinnati.  He was tenured in Classics and has taught Religious Studies at New York University and is former Distinguished Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland.

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