After an initial inquiry into the distinction between difference and the differential, in a text’s constant divergence from itself, the chapter examines the relationship between language and anatomy: how deeply embedded in the body is language? How biological is it? And what repercussions do these questions have for translation? There follow further reflections on the written and the spoken and poetry’s part in that dichotomy. The chapter then engages with issues of speech-flow and articulation and goes on to look at connections between diversity and the subjectivation of expression.

In the empirical exploration of ethical pedagogies, a quartet of themes are salient. The classic theme of and debate over the relative weighting of nature over nurture is inescapable. A second concerns the extent to which any given repertoire of norms, values, exemplars, and ideals are written in sociocultural stone versus the extent to which they are malleable, fluid, of unstable valence, and liable to elimination or supplementation. A third concerns the degree to which the techniques of the ethical pedagogue are informal or formal. A fourth concerns the place that ethical students occupy within the dynamics of incorporation and objectification. Neglect any of these themes and infelicities can result. Among them, the crucial role that childhood socialization plays in ethical formation might not receive the acknowledgement it is due. The distinction between ethics and ethos might suffer conflation. Worst of all, the anthropologist of ethics might run the risk of slipping into methodological or – even worse – ontological individualism. Proper attention to ethical pedagogies can ameliorate such infelicities. It can also facilitate recognizing that pedagogies, at whatever stage in the life course, are foundational to ethical formation, deformation, and reformation.

While not typically considered a postcolonial writer, Ishiguro’s work often engages with the question of British and Japanese imperialism and colonialism, either directly in works such as An Artist of the Floating World, When We Were Orphans, and the Ishiguro-scripted film The White Countess, or through subtle allusion to the American post-war occupation of Japan in A Pale View of Hills or the Suez Crisis in The Remains of the Day. Writing from the ‘inside’, from the perspective of individuals who are unwittingly complicit in the structures of oppression entailed by colonial rule, Ishiguro offers complex and unsettlingly sympathetic depictions of the psychological denials and displacements that allow individuals to operate within these regimes. Focusing on An Artist of the Floating World, When We Were Orphans, and The White Countess, this chapter responds to the ways in which Ishiguro’s fiction attends to the relationship between individual and collective responsibility and historico-political forces.

The neoliberal restructuring of society is presented in the paper as a renewed drive to enable the further expansion of the capitalistic mode of production threatened i.a. by the ecological crisis. Precisely because the warnings of the report to the Club of Rome “Limits to Growth,” sanctioning the end of the post-war dynamic stability rooted in economic growth and represented by Atlantic Fordism was taken very seriously by the economic elite, forces joined towards a radical restructuring of societies in order to unleash new possibilities for growth and profit accumulation. Neoliberal governmentality paradoxically embraces the challenge launched by Ecological Economists to focus on life as a productive and creative process and matures as a new mode of governing life that operate with and not against life’s power. Against the neoliberal stealth revolution, degrowth embodies a radical alternative project, both with respect to the substantial goals and to the mode of operation of neoliberal governmentality. In its heterogeneity, degrowth opens spaces for radical imaginaries, practices, and experiences that challenge the neoliberal, pervasive logic of growth and self-optimization, while experimenting possibilities for alternative subjectivities and new modes of being.