Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other

Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other PDF Author: Eric Sean Nelson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781438480244
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"This book sets up a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address today's environmental and social-political situation. The chapters focus on critical natural history and the environmental crisis (part 1), religion, prophecy, and the good (part 2), and an asymmetrical account of equality, liberty, and solidarity (part 3). Eric S. Nelson presents a critical ethics of the material other, addressing the alterities, non-identities, and the good that constitute, interrupt, and reorient ethical and social-political forms of life. This ethics of the material other has significant implications. First, the self is constituted through material and communicative relations to others in "other-constitution" rather than individual or collective self-constitution. Second, encounters with the prophetic "other-power" or transcendence of the good in others-in the ordinary mundanities and sufferings of immanent material life-disturb the economies of the individual ego relishing its own happiness and collective identities that codify themselves through the subjugation and refusal of non-human and human others. Finally, the infinite ethical and social-political demand of others calls for unrestricted solidarities that can transform ethical and social-political sensibilities, if always in relation to the material and communicative conditions of contemporary global capitalism"--

Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other

Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other PDF Author: Eric Sean Nelson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781438480244
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
"This book sets up a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address today's environmental and social-political situation. The chapters focus on critical natural history and the environmental crisis (part 1), religion, prophecy, and the good (part 2), and an asymmetrical account of equality, liberty, and solidarity (part 3). Eric S. Nelson presents a critical ethics of the material other, addressing the alterities, non-identities, and the good that constitute, interrupt, and reorient ethical and social-political forms of life. This ethics of the material other has significant implications. First, the self is constituted through material and communicative relations to others in "other-constitution" rather than individual or collective self-constitution. Second, encounters with the prophetic "other-power" or transcendence of the good in others-in the ordinary mundanities and sufferings of immanent material life-disturb the economies of the individual ego relishing its own happiness and collective identities that codify themselves through the subjugation and refusal of non-human and human others. Finally, the infinite ethical and social-political demand of others calls for unrestricted solidarities that can transform ethical and social-political sensibilities, if always in relation to the material and communicative conditions of contemporary global capitalism"--

Between Levinas and Heidegger

Between Levinas and Heidegger PDF Author: John E. Drabinski
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438452594
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Although both Levinas and Heidegger drew inspiration from Edmund Husserl's phenomenological method and helped pave the way toward the post-structuralist movement of the late twentieth century, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the relation of these two thinkers. There are plenty of simple—and accurate—oppositions and juxtapositions: French and German, ethics and ontology, and so on. But there is also a critical intersection between Levinas and Heidegger on some of the most fundamental philosophical questions: What does it mean to be, to think, and to act in late modern life and culture? How do our conceptions of subjectivity, time, and history both reflect the condition of this historical moment and open up possibilities for critique, resistance, and transformation? The contributors to this volume take up these questions by engaging the ideas of Levinas and Heidegger relating to issues of power, violence, secularization, history, language, time, death, sacrifice, responsibility, memory, and the boundary between the human and humanism.

Minimal Theologies

Minimal Theologies PDF Author: Hent de Vries
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801880179
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 764

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Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other

Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other PDF Author: Eric S. Nelson
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438480253
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 593

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Book Description
This book sets up a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address contemporary environmental and social-political situations. Eric S. Nelson explores the "non-identity thinking" of Adorno and the "ethics of the Other" of Levinas with regard to three areas of concern: the ethical position of nature and "inhuman" material others such as environments and animals; the bonds and tensions between ethics and religion and the formation of the self through the dynamic of violence and liberation expressed in religious discourses; and the problematic uses and limitations of liberal and republican discourses of equality, liberty, tolerance, and their presupposition of the private individual self and autonomous subject. Thinking with and beyond Levinas and Adorno, this work examines the possibility of an anarchic hospitality and solidarity between material others and sensuous embodied life.

Saying Peace

Saying Peace PDF Author: Jack Marsh
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438482663
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
Levinas's big idea is that our lived sense of moral obligation occurs in an immediate experience of the otherness of the Other, and that moral meaning is grounded in alterity rather than identity. Yet he also held what seemed an inconsiderate, or "eurocentric," view of other cultural traditions. In Saying Peace, Jack Marsh explores this problem, testing the coherence and adequacy of Levinas's central philosophical claims. Using a twofold method of reconstruction and critique, Marsh conducts a holistic immanent evaluation of Levinas's major works, showing how the problem of eurocentrism, and abiding ambiguities in Levinas's political and religious thought, can be traced back to specific problems in his general philosophical methodology. Marsh offers an original analysis of Levinas's method that verifies and extends existing critical work by Jacques Derrida, Robert Bernasconi, Judith Butler, and others. This is the first book to foreground the normative question of chauvinism in Levinas's work, and the first to perform a holistic critical diagnosis of his general philosophical method.

African Witchcraft and Otherness

African Witchcraft and Otherness PDF Author: Elias Kifon Bongmba
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791490505
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
This work of African philosophy and theology uses the thought of Emmanuel Levinas to provide an analysis of tfu (witchcraft) among the Wimbum people of Cameroon along with a critique of intersubjective relations. Taking an approach he calls "critical contextualism," author Elias Bongmba employs Levinas's philosophy, particularly the concept of the Other, to engage in cross-cultural philosophy that does not destroy the perspective of the culture under study. Insights from anthropology, African studies, and the author's own experiences are also important throughout the book. Bongmba discusses the cultural background of the Wimbum people and explores the concepts and terms used to discuss the acquisition of several categories of power generally described as tfu. Bongmba argues that when properly explored and understood, these terms refer to complex practices that involve power that can be used for good and power that can be abused. Drawing from Levinas, the author demonstrates that negative use of tfu constitutes a totalizing praxis. He goes on to endorse Levinas's call for a phenomenology of eros as a way of reconfiguring interpersonal relationships.

Rethinking Facticity

Rethinking Facticity PDF Author:
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 0791478750
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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How to Measure a World?

How to Measure a World? PDF Author: Martin Shuster
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253054559
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
What does it mean to wonder in awe or terror about the world? How do you philosophically understand Judaism? In How to Measure a World?: A Philosophy of Judaism, Martin Shuster provides answers to these questions and more. Emmanuel Levinas suggested that Judaism is best understood as an anachronism. Shuster attempts to make sense of this claim by alternatively considering questions of the inscrutability of ultimate reality, of the pain and commonness of human suffering, and of the ways in which Judaism is entangled with the world. Drawing on phenomenology and Jewish thought, Shuster offers novel readings of some of the classic figures of Jewish philosophy while inserting other voices into the tradition, from Moses Maimonides to Theodor W. Adorno to Walter Benjamin to Stanley Cavell. How to Measure a World? examines elements of the Jewish philosophical record to get at the full intellectual scope and range of Levinas's proposal. Shuster's view of anachronism thereby provokes an assessment of the world and our place in it. A particular understanding of Jewish philosophy emerges, not only through the traditions it encompasses, but also through an understanding of the relationship between humans and their world. In the end, Levinas's suggestion is examined theoretically as much as practically, revealing what's at stake for Judaism as much as for the world.

Thinking Difference with Heidegger and Levinas

Thinking Difference with Heidegger and Levinas PDF Author: Rozemund Uljée
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438478828
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Tracing the relationship between truth and justice as articulated by Heidegger and Levinas, Rozemund Uljée presents the relation between the two thinkers as a subtle, profound, and complex rapport, which includes both their proximity and radical difference. This rapport is conceived not as a confrontation, but rather as a transformation, as Levinas's notion of justice does not renounce Heidegger's account of truth and its deployment. Thinking Difference with Heidegger and Levinas shows how the ethical relation transforms the essence and task of philosophy in its entirety, since it shifts the orientation of philosophy and the task of thinking from its concern with truth as ground or foundation to a question of justice. As a result, philosophy is no longer riveted to Being and its truth, but answers to the call for justice and must be conceived of as infinite commencement, where its impossibility to totalize meaning ensures that it remains open to the alterity of transcendence.

Novitas Mundi

Novitas Mundi PDF Author: D. G. Leahy
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438410263
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
The "Prolegomena" sets out the fundamental perception of the history of being now operative in consciousness. The center of the book is comprised of a two-part "Reflection on the History of Being": Part I is an examination of the impact made on the shape of scientific philosophy by the fact of Christian faith. Aristotle, the sacra doctrina of Thomas Aquinas, and their relationship with the modern thinkers, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard are examined in this section. In Part II the history of the conception of time becomes the measure of a prospective analysis of the limits essential to the modern enterprise. Augustine, Leibniz, Husserl, and Heidegger become the major figures here, and there is a specific delineation of the relationship of the phenomenologists to Kierkegaard and Hegel.