Ethics at a Standstill
History and Subjectivity in Levinas and the Frankfurt School
Publication Year: 2008
Demonstrating an authoritative command of both the thinkers themselves—including Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Marcuse—and the various philosophical contexts in which they are embedded, Horowitz offers a politically thoughtful and philosophically provocative analysis based on a wide range of texts and a critical reconstruction and confrontation between the positions.
Published by: Duquesne University Press
Cover
Title Page, Copyright
Contents
Abbreviations
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pp. vi-viii
Introduction
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pp. ix-xx
This essay grows out of the conviction that both the Frankfurt School and Levinas each fall short of their own theoretical ambitions, yet do so in ways that allow for the possibility of a mutual fecund embrace. Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy is wanting in the promotion and orientation of the social critique ...
One. Totality, Ethics, and History
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pp. 1-42
At the limits or on the horizon of ethics as first philosophy Levinas leaves thought with a conundrum and in an impasse. The ethical relation demands, or has inexorably laid upon it, contains—as though it were a condition of its own possibility—another relation that, while not quite negating ethics, betrays ethics, and in betraying it, strains ethics to the breaking ...
Two. On the Concept of Natural History
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pp. 43-106
The structure of the relation that Levinas unfolds between history and eschatology, like that between justice and ethics, and between subjectivity and the absolutely other, discloses an anterior posteriority. The end of history will have always already taken place. The end has already preceded its beginning. From within the ethical optic, a judgment on history will also therefore always ...
Three. The Dialectic of Natural History
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pp. 107-168
Levinas’s thinking, as a philosophy out of the concrete, is certainly not insensitive to what Adorno calls the micrological. Time and again Levinas refers to typical yet concrete, small but significant instances of the ethical relation out of which his phenomenological investigation will yield structures that break up and reverse the totalizing operations of the Same, shattering the rigid ...
Four. Negative Dialectics and Ethics
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pp. 169-228
Adorno begins Negative Dialectics with the arresting claim that “philosophy . . . lives on because the moment to realize it was missed” (ND, 3). Much too easily this can be taken to imply that Adorno intends somehow to either restore philosophy to its traditional functions of grounding and synthesizing a comprehensive knowledge, à la Hegel, perhaps with a new degree ...
Five. The Preponderance of the Ethical
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pp. 229-304
Adorno’s changed philosophy represents not simply a change in the methods that might be employed in achieving inherited aims, but a refusal of, or an axial shift in those aims themselves. But if the performance of negative dialectics means to think against thought, this reflexive reversal does and must make use of that which it works against. For Adorno, to think is to identify. But ...
Six. The Sense of Hope
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pp. 305-364
Negative Dialectics, as we have seen, conveys the impression that a changed philosophy calls for a new categorical imperative, that receptivity to the preponderance of the object implies not only the failure of the power of identification, but my guilt of what I am thinking. But we have also seen that it would be more accurate to think the possibility of negative dialectics as ...
Notes
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pp. 365-388
Index
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pp. 389-404
E-ISBN-13: 9780820705491
Print-ISBN-13: 9780820704074
Page Count: 424
Publication Year: 2008
