Opening a new debate on the ethics of resistance, Drew Dalton addresses the problem of the absolute in ethical and political thought. Attacking the foundation of European philosophical morality, namely post-Kantian ethics, he critiques the idea that in order for ethical judgement to have any real power, it must attempt to discover and affirm some conception of the absolute good. Dalton brings some of the most influential contemporary philosophical traditions into dialogue with each other: speculative realists Badiou and Meillassoux; phenomenologists, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas; German Idealists, like Kant and Schelling; psychoanalysts Freud and Lacan; and finally, post-structuralists, specifically Foucault, Ranciere, and Zizek. The relevance of these thinkers to concrete socio-political problems is shown through reflections on the Holocaust, suicide bombings, the rise of neo-liberalism and neo-nationalism, as well as rampant consumerism and racism. The book proposes a radically new way of conceiving of contemporary ethical thought, not as an affirmation of the tyranny of the absolute, but as a resistance to it. Evil has been seen as the result of some inability or unwillingness within the moral subject to submit to the sovereign power of the absolute good. Evil has been cast in the history of western thought as a purely negative force: a kind of rebellion against or dissent from the absolute power of the good. This book re-defines ethical reasoning as that which refuses absolutes and resists what Milton's devil in Paradise Lost called the "tyranny of heaven." Re-casting ethics in sympathy with Milton's devil and against dominant European ethical sensibilities, Dalton sees evil not as merely moral failure, but as a source of potential resistance.