May Hibri approaches ethics not as a system of rules or moral prescriptions, but as an ontological condition, one that precedes agency, intention, and judgment.

The central question guiding her work is where ethical responsibility begins once we move beyond the familiar coordinates of moral subjects and sovereign decision-makers. Rather than grounding ethics in autonomy or rational will, she explores vulnerability, exposure, and temporality as the conditions that make ethical life possible at all.

A central thread in this inquiry is the animal unconscious: a pre-conceptual, trans-species register of vulnerability that precedes subjectivity and exceeds human moral frameworks. From this perspective, animals, technological systems, and artificial intelligence are not treated as moral agents or rights-bearing subjects, but as ethical placeholders, entities that carry the conditions of ethics without occupying the position of moral responsibility themselves.

This work moves across continental philosophy, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and critical technology studies, with sustained attention to delay, remainder, sedimentation, and irreversibility. It asks how responsibility persists in the absence of reciprocity, how harm can endure without phenomenology, and how ethical claims survive even when no subject can fully answer for them.

The aim is to articulate an ethics adequate to a world shaped by animal life, technological mediation, and planetary-scale infrastructures, an ethics that begins before norms, and a responsibility that does not depend on sovereignty.