Science, Technology and Modernity: Beck and Derrida on the Politics of Risk

The article deals with the implicit ethics of natural subjectivity that runs through Ulrich Beck's account of risk society, and the particular form of cosmopolitanism that he espouses. The argument, which is founded on Jacques Derrida's account of an ethics of messainic responsibility, maintains that the possiblity of reaching a cosmopolitian consensus of the kind presented by Beck, is always deferred into a logic of misrecognition from which contingent possibilities of agreement emerge.