Abstract: This dissertation attempts to articulate a postmodern ethics according to the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Emmanuel Levinas, primarily. Although their sensibilities might seem opposed to one another, I argue that Deleuze's Logic of Sense and Levinas' 'approach of the other' can be read as parallel iterations of that which inaugurates the possibility of both a distinction between self and other and of signification itself. To concretely explain the paradoxical relations both writers set up between Western dichotomies such as inside/outside, language/experience, and subject/object, I utilize Francisco Varela's theory of autopoietic self-constitution of living organisms, reading it as a textual figure for the abyssal origins of the subject. This figure echoes Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen's observations about the Freudian unconscious: that it is not a 'subject behind the subject' but is a paradoxical point of dis/identification with the other which renders identity itself undecidable and without discernable origin. I also argue that Giorgio Agamben's writings create a counterpoint against the oft-disparaged 'postmodern' sense of irresponsible free play; rather, they assert that postmodern theories themselves imply an ethics that eludes signification, as do Deleuze's event of sense and Levinas' approach of the other. Keeping in mind this unspeakability, I argue that metonymy makes an apt figure for characterizing both the Deleuzian event and the Levinasian approach, when imagined as an articulation which is the event of speaking and of appearing, but which is not reducible to what is said or that which appears. As such, metonymy functions as a literary trope for Levinasian 'transcendence,' which does not occur in any 'realm' beyond appearances, but is the transcendence of appearance itself. I conclude with a metonymic link to the work of Gertrude Stein, asking whether her poetics suggest an ethical 'way' by which we might proceed without ironically reinstituting a moral code or foundation. I also conclude by asking a series of questions rather than providing answers, thus suggesting that ethical sense as Deleuze, and perhaps Agamben would have it, must be understood as the exclusive gesture of differentiation suspended upon its own potentiality: a metonymic ethics proceeding as questions rather than propositions.