np:

Ethical Solidarity

by Grant Farred

5.5 x 8.5, 184 pgs., $24

ISBN 978-1-962365-10-9

Forthcoming Fall 2025.

Purchase copies here.

 

"Grant Farred’s new book isn’t just a challenge to what we thought we knew about ethics, and how the ethical will forever keep the political awake at night. More than that, this book throws down the gauntlet. But it’s a gauntlet that, by the time you reach down to pick it up, has turned into a serpent: one whose movements lead you forward, and backward, at the same time. “Begin again,” this book demands, but in neverendingness. It’s a beautiful and demanding book about generation. And generations."

—Cary Wolfe, Rice University

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“The Samaritan will not submit to any logic that affords him the possibility of hesitation or, worse, indecision.” This beautiful aphoristic book collects an archive of solidarity, noting the limits of some and committing to the promise therein. Thoughtful, beautiful, and moving, Grant Farred’s Ethical Solidarity is the right book for this moment, which throws us together and demands a response." 

—Bonnie Honig, Brown University

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"If Hegel first described the abyss between hope and fulfillment by the shape and form of absolute contingency, Grant Farred shapes this abyss into a series of fragments and aphorisms that always bear on the contingent, yet absolutely imperative, form of ethical solidarity for which the externality of “the ought” remains the other shard of the fragment to be thought . . . again!" 

—Gregg Lambert, Syracuse University

 

Composed as a series of aphorisms, drawing on a thinker such as G.W.F Hegel, the novels of JM Coetzee and Biblical figures such as Judas Iscariot and the Samaritan, Grant Farred's "Ethical Solidarity" offers a scrupulous distinction between ethical and political solidarity. "Ethical Solidarity" explains that the two concepts should never be conflated because the ethical is always prior to and more philosophically fundamental than the political. In making this distinction, "Ethical Solidarity" insists that we cannot understand the distinction without attending to how it is we understand betrayal.