The Question of the Other

Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Edited by Arleen B. Dallery & Charles E. Scott

Subjects: Feminist
Series: SUNY series, Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
Paperback : 9780791400333, 162 pages, July 1989
Hardcover : 9780791400326, 162 pages, July 1989

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Table of contents

I. Levinas: The Face of the Other

1. Adriaan Peperzak, From Intentionality to Responsibility: On Levinas's Philosophy of Language
2. Robert Bernasconi, Rereading Totality and Infinity
3. Richard A. Cohen, Absolute Positivity and Ultrapositivity: Husserl and Levinas

II. The Question of the Other's Claim

4. Diane Michelfelder, Derrida and the Ethics of the Ear
5. John D. Caputo, Disseminating Originary Ethics and the Ethics of Dissemination
6. Thomas C. Anderson, The Obligation to Will the Freedom of Others, According to Jean-Paul Sartre

III. An Other Voice

7. Debra B. Bergoffen, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Nietzsche for Women
8. Kate Mehuron, An Ironic Mimesis
9. Linda Singer, Defusing the Canon: Feminist Rereading and Textual Politics

IV. Attending to the Cultural Other

10. Michael D. Barber, Alma Gonzalez: Otherness as Attending to the Other
11. Kenneth Liberman, Decentering the Self: Two Perspectives from Philosophical Anthropology

V. The Destabilized Subject

12. Eleanor H. Kuykendall, The Subjectivity of the Speaker
13. Joseph Grange, Lacan's Other and the Factions of Plato's Soul
14. Dorothea Olkowski-Laetz, Space, Time, and the Sublime

VI. Foucault: Theory and the Destabilized Subject

15. David F. Gruber, Foucault and Theory: Genealogical Critiques of the Subject
16. Ladelle McWhorter, Foucault's Move beyond the Theoretical
17. Peg Birmingham, Local Theory
18. Michael Clifford, Postmortem Thought and the End of Man

Notes

Index

Description

The core source of this book is the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Beginning with a chapter on speaking and the other, three lead chapters focus on Levinas' account of the face of the other. These chapters are followed by explorations of the ethics of dissemination in Derrida, the freedom of the other in Sartre, the cultural other in Husserlian phenomenology, the other as sexual difference in Irigaray and Nietzsche, the sublime in aesthetics, and the deconstruction of the primacy of the ego in Foucault and Lacan.

This book is especially relevant to feminist theory. It shows that postmodern, continental philosophy does indeed have ethical implications. The question of the other or the presence of the other undercuts the foundationalist starting points of ethical theory and epistemology.

The Question of the Other presents fresh and original interpretations of Husserl, Nietzsche, Derrida, Levinas, Irigaray, Foucault, Lacan, Heidegger, and Sartre.

Arleen B. Dallery is Associate Professor of Philosophy at LaSalle University. Charles E. Scott is Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.