For anyone who read Radical Hermeneutics and was expecting another good read, you won't be disappointed. Caputo is thought provoking as always, and expands on several of the themes presented in his earlier writing. For anyone who hasn't read anything by Caputo, you will be treated to a style of writing that blends the tropes of continental philosophy with the "conversational" style of Richard Rorty.

The title is somewhat misleading: Caputo is not really "against" ethics, but is trying to counter the tendency of ethics (and "philosophy", by which Caputo means the metaphysics-of-presence style philosophy) to seek for and produce formulas and principles that will safeguard ethical decision making--counter this with a "poetics of obligation" that is, in an fairly unabashedly rhetorical way, trying to valorize open-ness to the call of the other (not Levinasian, infinite Other, but a personal, proper-named other), to the suffering of the other.

If this makes no sense to you, you may not get as much out of the book until you've read some Heidegger/Nietzsche/Derrida/Levinas, but I suspect it will nonetheless at least pique your interest. This book really is a "poetics" rather than an "ethics" or a "philosophy of obligation": Caputo, in a way that wood make Rorty proud, sets out to make obligation and attention to the particulars of situations look as good as possible, and to make (philosophical) Ethics look bad. If you want the hard arguments behind Caputo's work in this book, you'll have to turn to other sources, including Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, for a spelling out of the critique of metaphysics and ethics which Caputo adopts.

I think Caputo does a good job, and the only reason I haven't given this book five stars is that he tends to ramble and repeat himself in ways that don't add anything new or enlightening. Also, I found the "lyrical discourses" bit in the middle of the book, where Caputo introduces certain texts signed by pseudonyms that were sent to him "anonymously", just annoying and rather silly, and skipped it. ( )