Ethics at a Standstill

by Horowitz, Asher

• ISBN13: 9780820704081
• ISBN10: 0820704083
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-02-15
• Publisher: Duquesne Univ Pr

Summary

The author explores the philosophies of Levinas and the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, demonstrating the ways in which their works diverge from and complement each other. Not simply a comparative study in which approaches are compared and contrasted, nor an attempt to blend or synthesize thinkers with quite distinct aims and methods, the book suggests that Levinas and the Frankfurt School tend toward each other, that each speaks to the desire that the other already exhibits. As Horowitz explains, the manner in which these thinkers are here related to each other resembles Adorno?s suggestion, or even program, for thinking in constellations. This study grows out of a conviction, Horowitz writes, that both the Frankfurt School and Levinas each fall short of their own theoretical ambitions. Levinas emboldens but limits social critique by his radical ethics of responsibility for the other, whereas the Frankfurt School inadequately articulates the ethical basis of social criticism by only employing negative privative articulation of the ethical as interruptive surplus. Each, however, by heeding the philosophy of the other, could have possibly taken several important additional steps, which are considered here. Demonstrating an authoritative command of both the thinkers themselves?including Benjamin, Horkheimer, and Marcuse?and the various philosophical contexts (German idealism, phenomenology, Marxism, psychoanalysis) 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.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Totality, Ethics, and History; On the Concept of Natural History; The Dialectic of Natural History; Negative Dialectics and Ethics; The Preponderance of the Ethical; The Sense of Hope; Index.