Contemporary Continental Ethics
One of the first readings, in English or French, of Édouard Glissant as an ethical theorist
- Brings together Caribbean and Latin American ethics to provide a new concept of responsibility that addresses inequities rooted in colonial projects
- Re-envisions contemporary human rights practice based on the duties entailed in the decolonial (third-generation) rights claims made by the dispossessed
- Connects Glissant’s claim of a ‘right to opacity’ to ethical bearings, and by doing so presents a path for human rights and decolonial movements to come together
What do we in the West owe those who grow our food, sew our clothes and produce our electronics? And what have we always owed one another, but forgotten, avoided, or simply disregarded?Looking back on nearly a century of colonial war and genocide, in 1990 the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant appealed directly to his readers, calling them to re-orient their lives in service of the political struggles of their time: ‘You must choose your bearing.’Informed by the prayer camps at Standing Rock, and presenting Glissant alongside Stuart Hall, Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, Enrique Dussel, Gloria Anzaldúa and W. E. B. Du Bois, this book offers an urgent ethics for the present – an ethics of risk, commitment and care that together form a new sense of decolonial responsibility.
What is the significance of hermeneutics at the intersections of ethics, politics and the arts and humanities?
- Discusses how hermeneutics offers ways to develop an ethics
- Makes the case for the relevance of contemporary hermeneutics for current scholarly discussions of responsibility within continental European philosophy
- Contributes a new, ethically inflected approach to current debate within post-Gadamerian hermeneutics
- Extends his analysis to the practice of living and covers animals, art, literature and translation
Few topics have received broader attention within contemporary philosophy than that of responsibility. Theodore George makes a novel case for a distinctive sense of responsibility at stake in the hermeneutical experiences of understanding and interpretation.
He argues for the significance of this hermeneutical responsibility in the context of our relations with things, animals and others, as well as political solidarity and the formation of solidarities through the arts, literature and translation.
A systematic reflection on the social conditions of caring for others
- Offers a feminist renewal of Adorno’s philosophy
- Stages a conversation between two strands of theory that, despite the importance that they each grant to human vulnerability, have yet to enter into discussion: the Frankfurt School and the ethics of care
- Sheds light on the difficulties and the lacuna of Adorno’s Critical Theory concerning patriarchy
- Highlights the difficulty involved in determining the meaning of a moral act in the capitalist context
- Brings the work of one of the leading figures of the contemporary French reception of Critical Theory to an English-language audience
Estelle Ferrarese, one of the leading figures of the contemporary French reception of Critical Theory, offers a renewal of the thinking of Theodor W. Adorno. Ferrarese develops our thinking about the social conditions of caring for others, while arguing for an understanding of morality that is materialist and political – always-already political.
Taking the social philosopher Adorno as a point of departure, Ferrarese questions this social philosophy by submitting it to ideas deriving from theories of care. She thinks through the mechanisms of the social fragility of caring for others, the moral gesture it enjoins, as well as its political stakes.
In the end, Ferrarese shows that the capitalist form of life, strained by a generalised indifference, produces a compartmentalised attention to others, one limited to very particular tasks and domains and attributed to women.
A substantially new account of obligation, inspired by major thinkers in the Continental tradition
Bryan Lueck offers a substantially new solution to a classic philosophical problem: how is it possible that morality genuinely obligates us, binding us without regard to our perceived or actual well-being? Staging a fruitful dialogue between the analytic and Continental philosophical traditions, while reflecting specifically on the work of Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, Serres and Nancy, Lueck offers a creative new approach. Building on Immanuel Kant’s fact of reason – the idea that being a moral subject presupposes that one has accepted the bindingness of obligation – Lueck shows that moral obligation must be rethought as the fact of sense.
Key Features
- Presents a substantially new approach to the classic philosophical problem of the source of normativity
- Provides a detailed account of the history of western philosophical reflection on obligation
- Develops the ethical implications of the work of 20th century and contemporary Continental philosophers who are not typically regarded as moral philosophers
- Suggests new and fruitful paths of research on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Serres and Nancy
