In November 2002, Judith Butler delivered the Adorno Lectures at the University of Frankfurt with overwhelming success, which are now being published in a significantly expanded edition as a paperback. In her critique of ethical violence, she explores how one can still maintain the possibility of responsibility and accountability in light of a theory of the subject, whose conditions of emergence can never be completely clarified. Engaging with Adorno, Cavarrero, Foucault, Lévinas, and psychoanalysis, Butler demonstrates that each of these theories contains something ethically significant that arises from the limits imposed on any attempt to account for oneself: even in what we call "ethical failure," there lies an ethical value and significance, and the question of ethics emerges precisely at the boundaries of our systems of communication.