Ethics - Politics - Subjectivity: Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (Phronesis)

by SimonCritchley (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1999

  $11.51

  Examines the three questions at the centre of contemporary theoretical debate: what is ethical experience? what can be said of the subject who has this experience? and what, if any, is the relation of ethical experience to politics? These questions are approached by way of a critical confrontation with a number of major thinkers, including Lacan, Genet, Blanchot, Nancy, Rorty and, in particular, Levinas and Derrida. The author offers a critical reconstruction of Levinas's notion of ethical experience and, questioning the religious pietism and political conservatism of the dominant interpretation of Levinas's work, develops an ethic of finitude which opens on to an experience of humour and the comic.