This paper explores how the grammar of domination in late modernity has shifted from rationality to ethics. Critical theorists once argued that fascism revealed modernity’s central contradiction: reason turning against itself. Yet this paper argues that in the aftermath of neoliberalism, domination no longer hides behind rationality, but behind ethical vocabularies of responsibility, authenticity, and even of care. Where “critical theory” (the so-called Frankfurt School) was concerned with the dialectic of reason, I describe a shift to the dialectic of ethics: a configuration in which ethical discourse simultaneously promises freedom and reproduces subjection. Like reason in the twentieth century, ethics in the twenty-first has its own sexual division of labour. Neoliberal societies in the Global North feminize ethical responsibility, delegating care, conscience, and maintenance to women, even more so upon racialized and/or migrant women, while masculinizing freedom as impunity, especially for white men.
Thinking with and against the "Frankfurt School," I argue that this shift from reason to ethics demands a new kind of critical theory, one attentive to how neoliberalism has remade ethical life itself. The paper explores whether feminist theory can pursue immanent critique within a world saturated by ethics, or whether critique must move beyond ethics to rediscover possibilities of agency and structural transformation. What does freedom mean when ethics itself has become a mode of rule? And can the feminist ethical subject—burdened, feminized, and individualized—still be the agent of collective change?
