Restyling the subject of responsibility in international relations

The article combines the later works of Michel Foucault with Julia Kristeva's writings to rethink the 'subject' of responsibility in international relations. In developing Foucault's conception of ethics through Kristeva's psychoanalytically informed notion of the 'stranger within', the article places the question of subjectivity at the heart of discourses concerned with ethics in international relations. In seeking to move the terms of debate beyond the epistemological and ontological certainties which confine ethics to the realm of inter-state relations, the article argues for an aesthetic ethical position which sees self-constitution and self-transfiguration as a starting point for a postpositivist ethical agenda in our discipline. An aesthetic ethics that has relevance for international relations incorporates a view of the self as having a capacity to reinvent her or his mode of being as a work of art into an exploration of the self's relation with its constitutive 'other'.