By Rudi Visker (auth.), R. Bernet, J. Taminiaux, S. IJsseling, H. Leonardy, D. Lories, U. Melle (eds.)
At the foundation of this quantity, an easy query: what to make of that unusually monotonous sequence of statements produced through our societies and our philosophers that every one converge in a single topic - the significance of difference?
To make clear the that means of the variation at stake right here, we now have attempted to rephrase it by way of the 2 significant and jointly competing paradigms supplied by means of the background of phenomenology in simple terms to discover either one of them both not able to house this distinction with no violence. Neither the moral nor the ontological strategy can account for a topic that insists on enjoying part of its personal instead of following the script supplied for it by means of both Being or the great. What seems to be, from a Heideggerian or Levinasian viewpoint, an unwillingness to divulge heart's contents to what deals to convey us from the situation of subjectivity is analysed in those pages as a constitution in its personal correct. faraway from being the wilful, detached and irresponsive being its critics have portrayed it to be, the so-called 'postmodern' topic is largely finite, no longer even in a position to suppose the transcendence to which it owes its singularity. This lack of ability isn't a scarcity - it issues as a substitute to a undeniable unthought shared by way of either Heidegger and Levinas which units the phrases for a dialogue not our personal. rather than blaming Heidegger for underdeveloping 'being-with', we must always fairly pressure that his account of mineness can be, within the gentle of up to date philosophy, what stands so much short of revision. And, rather than hailing Levinas because the critic whose tension at the alterity of the opposite corrects Heidegger's existential solipsism, the issues into which Levinas runs in defining that alterity demand a distinct analysis and a corresponding swap within the direction that phenomenology has taken in view that. rather than preoccupying itself with the invisible, we should always specialize in the constructions of visibility that guard us from its terror.
The consequence? An account of distinction that's neither ontological nor moral, yet 'mè-ontological', and which can support us comprehend a number of the difficulties our societies have come to stand (racism, sexism, multiculturalism, pluralism). And, within the wake of this, an unforeseen defence of what's at stake in postmodernism and within the query it has refused to take evenly: who're we? ultimately, an homage to Arendt and Lyotard who, if learn via each one other's lenses, supply a precise articulation to the query with which our age struggles: how you can imagine the 'human ' as soon as one realizes that there's an 'inhuman' part to it which, rather than being its mere negation, seems to be that with no which it will come to lose its humanity?