Before the Voice of Reason : Echoes of Responsibility in Merleau-Ponty's Ecology and Levinas's Ethics

by Kleinberg-levin, David Michael

• ISBN13: 9780791475492
• ISBN10: 0791475492
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-09-04
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr

Summary

"Before the Voice of Reason is a phenomenological critique of reason grounded in our experience of the voices that already address us and summon us prior to the emergence of the voice of reason. In part one, David Michael Kleinberg-Levin explores the voices of nature and draws on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology to offer a new way of thinking about environmental responsibility. In part two, he looks at the voice of the moral law and the voices of other human beings, advances a more nuanced account of Levinas's distinction between "Saying" and "Said," and proposes a new argument for our responsibility to the other."--BOOK JACKET.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
A Human Voice	p. 1
The Project	p. 14
The Ethical Root of the Voice	p. 24
The Voice of Reason	p. 25
Reconciling Voices: the Political Register	p. 35
Conversation	p. 41
Reading This Book	p. 46
The Singing of the World: The Claim of Nature in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology
The Remembrance of Nature in the Voice of the Subject	p. 53
Invocations of Nature	p. 53
The Song of the Winds	p. 71
The Song of the Earth	p. 86
The Question of Origins	p. 98
Silence	p. 98
Song	p. 102
The Voice of Ecological Attunement in a Practice of Caring for Oneself	p. 110
Prologue	p. 110
The Singing of Language	p. 114
Caring for Oneself: The Three Phase-Dimensions of the Voice	p. 119
Dying Echoes: What Must Be Remembered	p. 134
Levinas: On the Claim of the Ethical
The Saying and the Said: Giving Time to the Voice of the Other	p. 147
Unavoidable Violence	p. 148
Responsibility: Claiming the Voice	p. 152.
Inspiration	p. 153
Heterology, Heteronomy: The Lyrical Voice	p. 157
The Ethical Dimensions of the Voice	p. 158
Ethical Saying: The Claim in Dialogue	p. 164
The Pre-Originary Dimension of Saying	p. 181
Preliminary Soundings	p. 181
The Voice of Reason	p. 193
The Pre-Originary Voice	p. 200
Palimpsest: The Trace of the Other in the Text of Our Flesh, or, The Echo of the Other in the Trembling of the Flesh	p. 205
Enigmatic Echoes: Retrieving the Trace	p. 223
Epilogue	p. 241
My Voices	p. 245
Notes	p. 247
Index	p. 287
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