Why Should I Care? A Politics of Indifference

Posing the question ‘Why should I care?’ is not meant to be rhetorical; it is an ontological, ethical and political query intended to challenge the frameworks that structure notions of responsibility and obligation — particularly the assumption that we ought to reason and act, or organize our political worlds, from a basis of concern or care. The key problem with leveraging care for ethics is that it requires an other, irreducible to the self, who can generate an imperative of responsibility. Yet, this implicitly commits its proponents to an ontology of difference that creates an unbridgeable gap between the ethical and political. Since life as difference can only enter the polis by way of exclusion, disjunction or negative accumulation, I offer indifference as an alternative. Indifference not only provides more fertile ground for ethics, but also allows for the emergence of new political forms that, by better attending to life’s multitudes, have potential to upend the politics of division, oppression and ressentiment that issue from difference.