Levinas, Adorno, and the ethics of the material other / Eric S. Nelson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nelson, Eric Sean, author.

Series:

SUNY series in contemporary French thought

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969.

Lévinas, Emmanuel.

Physical Description:

x, 469 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020]

Summary:

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: pt. I After Nature: Ethics, Natural History, and Environmental Crisis

1. Toward a Critical Ecological Model of Natural History

2. Natural History, Nonidentity, and Ecological Crisis

3. Communicative Interaction or Natural History? Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature

4. The Trouble with Life: Life-Philosophy, Antinaturalism, and Transcendence in Levinas

5. An Ethics of Nature at the End of Nature

pt. II Unsettling Religion: Suffering, Prophecy, and the Good

6. Religion, Suffering, and Damaged Life: Nietzsche, Marx, and Adorno

7. The Disturbance of the Ethical: Kierkegaard, Levinas, and Abraham's Binding of Isaac

8. Ethics between Religiosity and Secularity: Kierkegaard and Levinas

9. Prophetic Time, Materiality, and Dignity: Bloch and Levinas

10. Ethical Imperfectionism and the Sovereignty of Good: Levinas, Løgstrup, and Murdoch

pt. III Demanding Justice: Asymmetrical Ethics and Critical Social Theory

11. Equality, Justice, and Asymmetrical Ethics

12. The Pathologies of Freedom and the Promise of Autonomy

13. The Limits of Liberalism: Cosmopolitanism, Tolerance, and Asymmetrical Ethics

14. Recognition, Nonidentity, and the Contradictions of Liberalism.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781438480244

1438480245

9781438480237

1438480237

OCLC:

1142020043