Existentialism Books

If you have ever read a commentary on Hegel (or on any great and difficult philosopher about whom much has been written), you will tend to find a few illuminating passages here and there interspersed among difficult and technical discussions and digressions intended to satisfy the critical concerns of this or that critical reader. In short, you will tend to find (with rare exceptions, which include this exemplary reading of Hegel) that while occasionally the author gets at the subject matter itself addressed by the philosopher in question, they will as often address themselves through the lens of the book to working through their own idiosyncratic philosophical preoccupations combined with the preoccupations of those predecessor commentators whose views they could not safely ignore. I say this not to cast suspicion generally upon those who are willing to undertake the nearly thankless task of becoming a scholar (and not to suggest that such work is not important for the purposes it does serve of refining insights and challenging preconceptions among scholars and teachers) -- but merely to point out a fact that may be obvious to scholars but not to the casual or interested reader: whatever the stated intentions of the author/scholar, commentaries are for the most part not written for the casual reader but are written to a highly specialized group of peers to establish a reputation among and achieve recognition by these peers (of course motivated by a genuine interest in the subject matter that excites this small community).

That is why it is so refreshing to come across a work like John Russon's "Reading Hegel's Phenomenology": a philosophical commentary that is truly novel and accessible, and that approaches the Phenomenology of Spirit with the conviction that the subject matter of Hegel's phenomenology is the actual experience of each and every one of us. For Russon, this has the implication that above all a reading of Hegel's difficult book should make an effort to tie the initially obscure language of the text to illuminating and clear descriptions of real life. In each of Russon's provocative and powerful chapters, each focused on the different sections of Hegel's book, Russon attempts to identify a core phenomenon with which each of us can't help but be familiar, as a starting point from which to ground his analysis of the sections of the text. To find a commentary that employs a similar method as effectively, you would almost have to go back to Kojeve's "Introduction to the Reading of Hegel" (and I can't help but suspect that the similarity in titles is a deliberate move on Russon's part to suggest the affinity of his approach -- even where the substance of their analyses differ -- to that of Kojeve). The difference, that tells in favor of Russon's book, is that in Kojeve's book the primary experiential base from which he explicates almost the entire Phenomenology is his illuminating and provocative account of situations of unequal recognition, where in an intersubjective situation one person dominates and the other submits. Kojeve's insight into such situations, drawn from his analysis of Hegel's master/slave dialectic, and his recognition that they are widely characteristic of human social situations, provides a strong basis from which to consider a range of the developments in the Phenomenology -- and his work has with strong right been enormously influential on readers of Hegel. What his primary focus tends to obscure, however, is that Hegel's analysis aims at overcoming such situations of unequal recognition, and that he holds there to be real moments of contemporary existence in which such situations are in fact overcome. Russon's book is, for that reason, more widely applicable -- given his concern to highlight the relevance of Hegel's phenomenology to a much broader range of experiential phenomena: the existential experience of time, the feeling of one's own body, the power of desire, the encounter with an other, the experience of reading, the formation of communal belonging through ritual practice, moral engagement, and religious experience (to mention just some). It is an exceptional work of scholarship and teaching, that should serve as a model for philosophical commentary that is both rigorous in its responsibility to primary texts and philosophically illuminating in its own right. Highly recommended for anyone interested in thinking seriously about their lives and thoughts along with Hegel, rather than merely learning about Hegel. (By the way, if the task of thinking seriously about actual life intrigues you, it is worth taking a look at one of Russon's other books: "Human Experience" - a provocative and challenging investigation of the ways we attempt and fail to bring our lives into coherent and satisfying unity, and how philosophy can be an essential component of self-analysis and self-development.)

Russon's book is a superb companion to Hegel's notoriously difficult text. I used it this past semester in a university course on Hegel, and my students found that "Reading the Phenomenology" made an enormous difference to their comprehension of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Russon writes with profound insight into Hegel's argument, and yet does so in a remarkably clear and accessible way. Somehow he seems to do the impossible--he provides new and exciting readings of Hegel's text that I believe to be of great importance and interest to scholars, yet he does so in a way that undergraduate readers (or indeed anyone else ready to take on the challenge of cracking Hegel's book!) can engage with immediately. I recommend Russon's book very highly.

This book has given me a great deal of insight into my personal life. It is very interesting and kept my interest throughout the entire book. And he is sooooooo cute!!!!!!!!

Corey Anton's work is rich account of the unique and once occurent ways self and world emerge into meaningful existence. Springing forth from Charles Taylor's, The Ethics of Authenticity, Anton provides a compelling account of selfhood that furthers the modern quest for authenticity, that is, the sense that "many people today feel that it is their right to live personally meaningful lives." Keeping at bay two responses people might take in regard to this quest, as a license for moral laxity or as a moral calling for poetic license, Anton makes recourse to the dialogical nature of self and the requirements of horizons of significance.
With a critical eye towards overly atomistic accounts of self in social scientific research, Dr. Anton, taking up the voice of existential phenomenology, describes the ways the self is primordially out side of its fleshy boundaries thrown into a meaningful world with others. As a matter of emphasis on this insight, Anton provides lucid descriptions of essential features of self: embodiment, sociality, symbolicity, and temporality.

The following are some highlights of the work.

The opening section on embodiment represents an almost mythical account of the body. Here Anton writes of the ground meaning of embodiment as being "thrown-out-from-yet-indigenous-to-earth." And, following Sartre's account of Being-in-itself, he writes "Earth as Earth is a non-existing event...as so full of itself, it exists not." If Earth is to fall into existence it will require "events of existential decompression." As Anton continues, "an embodied self is earth's way of taking flight from its fullness and first coming to itself...humans are not simply things on the earth; we are something it is doing." This section dives further into the phenomenological notion of intentionality, ala Merleau-Ponty, and concludes with the observation: nothing separates my body from the world.

The subject of negativity, of nothing, runs through out the work as a reminder of the self's dialogical/inseparable relation to world and others. For instance, in the chapter on sociality, Anton not only acknowledges that "hortatory don'ts" and "tribal thou shall nots" (a nod to Kenneth Burke) provide social regulations of appropriateness and acceptability, but he also delineates the primordial negativity implicit in face-to-face encounters. Anton writes, "My face as it is for me, is an intentional absence, yet it is the absence by which others' faces come to seeable existence. I do not have a face; other people have mine and I have theirs. Ridged boundaries between others and self need to be loosened because part of me is manifest only through others. Said simply: nothing separates me from others."

Nothing separating world, self, and others means that all talk is talk about others and the world. Hence, in the chapter on symbolicity Anton's account of self turns towards sonorousness (i.e. speech and language). Anton writes, "Human beings are naturally sonorous entities, caring for more than the here and now of their own bodies by releasing and appropriating the sayableness of existence." Being critical of those who would conceive speech and language as inventions, tools, or an unnatural add on to the human being, Anton maintains that such conceptions that hold the belief "that language is alien or not natural (perhaps humanly created) must be carefully scrutinized."

Of the various features of the self temporality is perhaps the most under appreciated in contemporary social theory. "It is so easy to forget (or never even notice) that we are temporality," writes Anton. "The human is more than extant, is not simply a body resting `in' time...World [and] self are happening through earth's internal negations and corresponding existential decompressions." In revealing the meaning of freedom in human beings relation to time, he sums up: "humans are time as temporality, which means that the past remains a future possibility; this is the past we are still moving toward. What we normally call the future is actually the past; it is the past that will-have-been."

The whole of Selfhood and Authenticity provides a compelling account of self that is indebted to others and world. The pursuit of authenticity with in the context of Anton's work, is struggle to meet fitting responses to and from the project of existence. "What could be less original, less authentic, than a job, any and every task, done with less than vital concern?" The inauthentic person is lacking a sense of duty, and harbors an indifference to the moments of existence. Authenticity, in Anton's last account, is a passionate responsibility, "a practice of openness by which we are called to fitting responses...a blissfully seduced obedience...a dutiful autonomy, one liberated by indebtedness."

Drabinski's study of Levinas's relation to Husserl is long overdue. Arguing against reading Levinas as primarily an ethicist, Drabinski lays out a compelling argument that Levinas's major contribution to phenomenology is in the area of the problem of sense: what is its origin? Or is that the appropriate question?

The book follows Levinas's development from his early works through _Otherwise Than Being_. Richard Cohen and others have noted the "remarkable continuity" of Levinas's thought: Drabinski bears this claim out, but locates this continuity not in explicit theorizing of the ethical relationship, but in the pursuit of the intentionality ("intentionality") proper to sensibility. As another reviewer has noted, this work offers a critical rebuttal to Janicaud's reading of Levinas as methodologically irresponsible. It also makes the case (although not explicitly) that a new (and this time complete) English translation of the final version of "En decouvrant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger" is needed: this work has only been partially translated, and one of the key essays in it that Drabinski uses to make his case has not, to my knowledge, ever been published in English.

Although there are points that are puzzling (the treatment of metaphysical Desire, for example), and (again, as a previous reviewer has noted) the treatment of Levinas's relationship to Heidegger is less than satisfying (especially given its brevity - really only one paragraph, and this by way of clearing the way for a demonstration of Levinas's Husserlian orientation), and some readers no doubt would wish that Levinas's more theological works were given more attention, still this is a remarkable and enlightening study, deserving of more attention. It is well worth reading and owning.

Drabinski's book is the first full-length treatment of Levinas' relation to Husserl to appear in English, and for this reason it will occupy an important place in Levinas scholarship for many years to come. Anyone with a serious interest in Levinas' relation to Husserl should take this book seriously.

Drabinski's argument is, among many things, a response to Dominique Janicaud's argument that the so-called "theological turn" in phenomenology---which Janicaud thinks begins with Levinas---does not remain true to the central tenets of the phenomenological method. Drabinski argues that Levinas does not "escape" from phenomenology, but rather extends its boundaries by reworking the idea of sensibility from within. This reworking is accomplished from within Husserl's method itself, so, Drabinski reasons, Levinas' relation to Husserl is essentially a positive one.

Drabinski shows a deep acquaintance with both Levinas' thought and phenomenology in general, and the quality of scholarship is high. If there is one problem with this book, however, it would be with Drabinski's assessment of Levinas' relation to Heidegger. Heidegger always remained an important phenomenological influence on Levinas, and it would have been useful for Drabinski to indicate in more depth exactly how Heidegger fits in Levinas' constellation of influences.

I could get this book very quickly. It's very new. thank you so much!

The life-world is a field of action. But action is not praxis. Acton should get meanings. Today, the life-world is faced with split.People are becoming one-sided. Schutz and Luckmann's research gave us a guide,they analied the sturcture of everydaylife, told us how to balance different aspects of our life. We'll know how to esteblish the meaning in the future. Shuguang,Yin.

IF J.H. van den Berg's history of the discovery of the laws of Thermodynamics sounds a bit dry, read on. The author's concern is for the relationship between cuture, history and scientific discovery; and he writes in a simple compelling style that belies the complexity of thought behind his narrative. You don't need to know anything about phenomological psychology or his theory of historical analysis (which he terms metabletics) to enjoy his essays. Just skip the first 45 pages which is background information written by other persons, and jump right into the text. It's very enjoyable.

In this work, phenomenological thinker van den Berg breaks through the barrier between theory and experience, and by implication also that between science and religion. His research serves as a powerful critique of both the reductionistic (scientistic) view of reality and also the modern institutional religious perspective that revelation and "natural theology" lie only in the past. His analysis of the long-delayed discovery of thermodynamics shows clearly how its historical and phenomenological roots lay in the social changes wrought by the French Revolution. Much as Karl Marx based his critique of capitalism on a critique of religion (and his economic errors were prefigured by his philosophical ones), van den Berg shows that the revolutionary overthrow of Nature's "Great Chain of Being" (as personified by the monarchy and aristocracy) permitted certain exceptional individuals to perceive Nature in a wholly new way. This gave us both the benefits of dramatically increased productivity and control of Nature but at the same time a devaluation of the personal sense of our place in the cosmos. These insights hold great promise for better understanding of the dynamic interaction of cultural worldviews and technology, with provocative implications for ethics and religion.

This collection of quotes about a huge variety of subjects includes such provacative, insightful, and delicious musings that to re-read it every couple months is an explosive experience.

I happily recomend it to anyone. If you've ever taken a Landmark Forum you'll find much of the same worldview tucked into compact thoughts a 1,000 years old.

I found this book to be very entertaining, as well as an enlightened take on Thomas E. Kelly's "new brand" of existentialism. It made the philosophy interesting and accessible. I highly recommend it.

This book came into my life three years ago. The Defining Statements of Existence have given mankind simple "rules" for understanding life. This is a must read for anyone wishing a deeper understanding of existence and the meaning of life. The Wonders emphasize man's free will and ability to choose and give clear examples of what holds us back from exercising these abilities. The Wonders provide the statements in a loving and gentle way which nurtures the reader and guides them gently into a deeper understanding of themselves as a human being. This book has definitely assisted me in changing the way I live my life. Thank you Wonders and thank you Rene & Maggie.

With the assistance of Maggie McGuffin-Gaudette, Rene Gaudette has channeled a "collective energy consciousness of reality" from the 29th dimension that provides six defining statements to help the reader move through a perception of reality beyond the five physical senses and move into unlimited possibilities as "creators of our own existence" unlimited by such concepts or circumstances as destiny or karma. Very highly recommended for students of metaphysics and spiritual philosophy, The Wonders is the result of this channeled body of knowledge and wisdom.

For some, Ad Astra per Aspera could function as a bungee cord that briefly pulls them back toward their misspent youth. This micro-brewed poetry should appeal to those who came of age in the eighties, saw that decade's defects and yet remain somehow indebted to it. The pages of Devlin's work are infused with a jaded innocence and an innocent jadedness which is out of step with the troubled tempo of today.

Who should read these postcards from the twentieth century? This book is medicine for weary seekers who want to recall what it was like to be young, talented and mockingly prodded by the question, "What the hell am I going to do with my life?"

Ad Astra per Aspera is a fragmentary hodgepodge, but the reflection of the author can be seen in its glittering shards of poetry---a young man playing with words as he comes to the realization that the world is playing with him. This book is unpolished and primitive. Some might be disappointed by it, but, then again, life disappoints many.

Paul Devlin is an ancient South American raft-builder who quietly tempts a Thor Heyerdahl to fathom his craftsmanship and follow the current of his ideas. This is the rough-hewn work of a smart young man.

We should never underestimate the significance of scandal. Whether as an effacement of religious strictures or simple bad manners, the scandal shocks the given and proper. In this wide-ranging and interesting collection of essays, the fact of being addressed - the scandal of a Saying that exceeds and disrupts the Said - is operative in pathos and vigor. The editors open the volume with a seemingly innocuous question: how should `readers address Emmanuel Levinas' and his work? (p. ix). As the preface and introduction venture into this question, the editors effectively deploy its aporetic complexity. These essays take up the necessary Levinasian task of `[...] deepening articulations, criticisms, and extensions of his thought' (p. xi). These gestures of depth, extension, and critique suggest that Levinas's writings move beyond themselves. As the editors announce, the varied contents and disciplines traversed throughout this book not only speak to the breadth of Levinas's work, but also to the necessity of bringing his themes to bear on issues he left unsaid. This disturbing yet necessary labor runs the risk of doing him an injustice. As we deepen, extend, and critique, as we follow Levinas even in holding him to account for his own areas of hypocrisy and injustice, we risk effacing the Saying which overflows his Said. Indeed, in reading this volume one feels that the problematic of justice which haunts Levinas's underdeveloped politics structures the very approach to his texts. Because we are shocked by his sayings, we labor with Levinas beyond or against Levinas.

These essays circulate within the tertiary fields of fidelity, prospectus, and evasion. In my view, the manner of address to a large extent circumscribes the salience of the analyses, suggestions, and encounters presented in these papers. With David Wood, we might invoke Heidegger's distinction: `In What is Called Thinking? Heidegger distinguishes between two ways of reading another thinker: going to them (through critique, polemic), and "going to their encounter"' (p. 153). It is in this manner of encounter that the scandal becomes decisive. Do we let Levinas disturb us? Do we allow the scandalous shock to operate through us even as we interrogate him? Do we take up his challenge in such a way that we can justly offer it back to him? This shock impressed itself upon me as I read this volume and will serve as the critical thread of this review. Indeed, it is the degree that each essay manifests disturbance, taking seriously the scandal of Levinas' Saying, that constitutes the measure of its fidelity, or at the very least, a viable critical prospectus that requires a more extensive address. In the essays I will term evasive, one gropes to even find real criticism. A number of essays fail to even rise to the level of a reading, let alone a critical `encounter.' It is here the question of justice becomes decisive. Whether or not one buys into Levinas's wager, we ought, at the very least, seek to hear him rather than simply using the name `Levinas' as a placeholder, as a mirror to reflect our own projects back to ourselves. The evasive responses to the Levinasian scandal either liquidate his particular themes in the author's own preferred topos, or knock down their own confused constructions of what Levinas is saying in the gesture of `moving beyond' him.
Rather than offer a gloss of each of the nineteen essays in this volume, I will proceed by discussing a few essays which exemplify the deepening, extension, and critique noted above. After briefly reviewing essays of the first two types, I want to tarry with the critical essays for a while. For as I hinted above, the manner in which these critical essays address Levinas dramatically illustrates the issue of justice in reading, and the justice of the reading suggested to me the manner in which the authors are disturbed by him, that is, how they take up the scandal.

The essays which open this book consider Levinas's philosophical work in relation to various biblical and Talmudic verses. In his essay, `Beyond Outrage: The Delirium of Responsibility in Levinas's Scene of Persecution', James Hatley takes up Levinas's controversial description of ethics as obsession, persecution, and so forth. Rather than seeking to assuage the controversy, Hatley intensifies and defends it in a moving reading of the Cain narrative. Rather than simply opposing the delirium of ethics to the orthodoxy of politically correct critics, Hatley brilliantly shows how the delirium operates within the persecutor, with one who seeks to evade responsibility as illustrated in the figure of Cain. In extending the ethical persecution to the persecutor, and then comparing the Cainic and Abrahamic responses to it, Hatley traces an interesting equivocity in its operation. In identifying and distinguishing the madness of ethics and the madness of Cain - of the faithful Abrahamic response and of the malicious ressentiment of the murderer - Hatley asks: `Would not Cain, in his state of mind, see the very call to which Abraham submits as a curse?' (p. 45). Abraham and Cain both see each other as cursed. Both are, in their own ways, dispossessed. Hatley intimates that the manner of response to the other determines this expropriating movement. While Abraham is disturbed to faithful attendance, Cain's evasion ossifies into the madness of forgetting and oblivion. Though he suggests that this evasion terminates in a forgetful celebration of the void, Hatley's reading opens the possibility of even Cain's redemption. Is not Abrahamic faithfulness, in its way, a search for Cain, the lost and guilty one? Is not the Abrahamic exodus - in all its madness and pathos - the redeeming movement where Cain is sought in the patience of God? Here, Cain's outrageous suffering is irreducible to simple retribution, but operates to open him to a responsibility which could redeem him. This beautiful essay exemplifies a deepening of Levinasian reflection, of successfully extending his concerns to regions left unsaid, and in manner which manifests a deep fidelity to his corpus.

In `The Responsibility of Irresponsibility: Taking Yet Another Look at the Akedah', Claire Elise Katz compares Kierkegaard's and Levinas's reading of the Akedah, the story of Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac. Katz promises to take their respective readings seriously as she attempts to `[...] synthesiz[e] Kierkegaard, Levinas, and Judaism' (p. 19). For those of us interested in bringing Kierkegaard and Levinas into contact, this prospect is intriguing. One often gets the feeling that Levinas's critique of Kierkegaard's readings is somewhat blunt and a bit anachronistic, even if one is sympathetic to the thrust of that critique. It is almost as if there were a gap between Kierkegaard's reading and Levinas's rejoinder. This gap operates in Katz's framing of the relation between their readings: `Kierkegaard's drama ends where for Levinas [...] the climax begins' (p. 29). Though Katz hints that she ultimately affirms Levinas's interpretation, she implores us, with Kierkegaard, to `read the story slowly and carefully,' (p. 25) to imagine with Kierkegaard the psychological turmoil, the fear and trembling Abraham experiences preparing for the terrible moment. She suggests that this turmoil lends force to where Levinas picks up: the hineni, the `here I am' of ethical election, as the decisive moment of the story. At this point the gap asserts itself all the more strongly: if Abraham is already an ethical subject, why go through the drama of preparation? In other words, to take Kierkegaard's reading seriously one must leave open the possibility of teleological suspension. If one closes this possibility, then the Akedah is simply a moral tale that illustrates the drama of Levinasian ethics. Katz must, then, mediate - must fill in the gap where Kierkegaard leaves off and Levinas begins. How does she do it? Katz claims that:
`[...] Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his child, and his receptiveness not to continue with the action, depict a necessary moment in the genesis of the ethical itself. Even if Levinas does not want to locate the ethical in an archē, [...] there is none the less the sense in which the ethical calls for its own explanation.' (p. 28)
What began as an intriguing prospect comes to a rather disappointing climax. Either Katz is not aware of the implications of her synthesis or it is a calculated attempt at onto-theological reductionism. In either case, her suggestion simply regresses to a type of rationalist valorization of the righteous self. Statements like the following seem to confirm this diagnosis:
`It is only through Abraham's bodily actions, through his preparation to sacrifice Isaac, that he has the epiphany of the ethical. And just as Abraham comes to understand through his actions, so too must we understand through the act of reading and reflection.' (p. 26)
The singularizing ordeal of faith and the singularizing hineni of ethical election evaporate in the auto-didactic movement of reflection. Katz's synthesis reinscribes precisely what Kierkegaard and Levinas rebel against. Her attempt to secure a `genesis' of the ethical, an ethics which `calls for its own explanation,' would reinscribe ethics back into the very universalism Levinas rescued it from. The site of this `genesis,' for Katz, is Abraham's own reflexive auto-affection. Thus, it is neither the ordeal of faith nor the face of Isaac that inscribes Abrahamic singularity, it is his own self-constitutive action. This Abrahamic in-and-for-itself would inaugurate the very violence Levinas contests as he thematizes the an-archic responsibility of ethics and it is against such a movement that Kierkegaard summons his teleological suspension.
One even questions whether Katz is aware of the onto-theological implications of her `synthesis.' In that the `test' for her Abraham is to `irresponsibly' defy God's unethical command, she intensifies Levinas's injunction to love the Torah more than God. She does so, however, in an inflection that is decidedly un-Levinasian. Levinas presents this injunction with a certain amount of fear and trembling: the God whom one defies is the God for Whom one may die. The defiance is for-the-other, a resolve to never allow religious pathos to terminate in violence. Katz admits that the `irresponsible' moment in her heroic responsibility is precisely being responsible to God. Yet is this the God of the Book, the God with whom Kierkegaard and Levinas wrestle? Or is it the self-constitutive archē, the in-and-for-itself of the onto-theological tradition, a placebo for bad conscience? Katz's essay illustrates how the gesture of productive extension can lead to a reversal of Levinas's most important themes. If we approach Levinas with too much familiarity, if we don't allow the scandal to disrupt our synthetic projects in a `slow and careful reading,' we run the risk of repeating the very violence he contests in the name of extending his insights.

I will now turn to discussing essays with a more explicit critical prospectus. As I hinted earlier, these essays differentiate in the manner in which they take up the scandal of Levinas. I will first tarry with the evasionary essays in that they manifest the scandal in such a way that allows us to appreciate and to be challenged by the decisive critical encounters that take place in this volume. In contrasting these critical approaches, I hope to underline some general trajectories they suggest for future Levinasian research.
There are a number of strategic resemblances in the following essays that constitute a type of orbit of evasion, they: 1) take a pedantic, patronizing tone, 2) insinuate a crypto-onto-theology and, 3) assimilate Levinas's themes to their own preferred topos. David Wood wants to ask `a more complex question,' a question that will instruct Levinas, will `provide a better model' of reading which might open upon `an ethical dimension that may have escaped Levinas' (p. 153). François Raffoul wants to take up the `injustices' in Levinas's reading of Heidegger, and does so `with an aim of deepening our understanding of the relation between ontology and ethics' (p. 144). Raffoul moves beyond instructing Levinas to teaching us all. Bernhard Waldenfels, after `correcting' Levinas's notion of Saying, cautions us to `read Levinas's text more cautiously' (p. 95). The irony in all these exhortations is that their authors fail to treat Levinas's texts with the justice and caution they prescribe. Wood, Raffoul, and Waldenfels all deploy the strategy noted above. First, they insinuate a crypto-ontotheology, suggesting that Levinas simply reinscribes pre-Heideggerian, indeed pre-critical, presuppositions (e.g. Hinterwelt). They then take the posture of elaborating, contra Levinas, the `proper' account of ethics and relation to alterity. This `proper' elaboration amounts to collapsing Levinas into other topoi, namely, Foucault (Waldenfels) and Heidegger (Wood and Raffoul). The common misunderstanding of these three essays is that they fail to grasp ethics as excess, as irreducible to ontological relatedness. Levinas explicitly says that the other is not another region to be `conquered'. Ethics and Being are indeed irreducible to one another, yet in a manner where they operate together. The accusative and imperative indicate how the relation is ordered, in that I may never approach the other with empty hands. This is the manner in which ethics is prior to and commands ontological relatedness. This indeed is a scandal to any thinking which locates transcendence primarily in self-constitutive activity. Such thinking is shocked by the command of the naked, the hurting, and the hungry. The alterity in ethics is precisely that which escapes and accuses one's spontaneity, more radical than the otherness which manifests in the Seyn relation. Indeed, if the other were another `region,' Levinas would be open to the charge of onto-theology, Hinterwelt, and so forth. This precisely highlights Levinas's qualm with Heidegger, if the other is considered as another region, or even another openness secondary to the negativity of being-toward-death, the other would not be other in that, in principle, she could be brought to manifestation/concealment in the play of Seyn.
Waldenfels, Raffoul, and Wood betray an evasive reading of Levinas in considering ontology and ethics as two separate and pure `regions.' They read Cartesian assumptions into Levinas, insinuate onto-theology, only in order to muddy the waters for opposing their own projects. They ignore entire tracts of Levinas's writing that are themselves anti-Cartesian. Such insinuations intentionally forget Levinas's explicit themes on such issues: the atheism of the I, the violence of the sacred, embodiment, the ethical an-archē, and so forth. This forgetting is not surprising, and in some cases not even intentional, in that these essays do not seriously read Levinas. They betray an interesting penchant for propriety, for the hegemony of correctness that follows when granting constitutive status to a logy or to an encompassing third term. The most violent of these insinuations ironically come from essays which both parrot and defend the Heideggerian mystique. These essays are indeed scandalized by Levinas. Yet their response amounts to a defense of propriety.

To close this review, I want to draw brief attention to a few essays which engage in genuine critical interaction. Robert Bernasconi raises the serious question of Levinas's Euro-centrism. Bettina Bergo brings Levinas and Freud into a fascinating and fruitful contact, raising interesting questions that warrant further address. Tina Chanter's essay, `Conditions: The Politics of Ontology and Temporality of the Feminine', displays a rigorous and sustained reflection on the problematic of the feminine in Levinas. Her essay most dramatically displays an honest critical engagement. As she scrupulously sojourns through the problematic and complex moments of the feminine in Levinas's architecture, she suggestively announces that: `The question we are confronting here cannot be divorced from the question of how politics stands in relation to Levinas's philosophy in general' (p. 331). She hints that Levinas's diachronic temporality may evoke a moment from which to theorize a politics of resistance. She confronts Levinas with Levinas as she writes:
`Feminism cannot claim a safe place, free of challenge, nor should it. It must take responsibility, however, for thinking about which others it exploits, and how and why it does so, in making a claim for itself. [...] A feminism that takes account of Levinas's diachronic notion of temporality should recognize both the need to maintain a disruptive effect in the refusal of the feminine to accommodate the categories of being, totality, or ontology, of never simply being a subject of knowledge, mastery, and recognition; and the need to assert that women must be recognized and thematized as subjects in the register of the said, taken account of by history that, while covering over alterity, has also afforded its subjects the privilege of recognition.' (p. 331)
If one would elaborate a Levinasian notion of authenticity, Chanter would exemplify it. She allows herself to be challenged by the scandal, to be disturbed by the other, to not absence herself and her own necessary project from the challenge Levinas presents. She leaves herself no alibi, no placebo for bad conscience, and in just this way manifests Levinasian responsibility. In her critical engagement she does justice to Levinas, both to his Said and to his Saying, in confronting his Said with his Saying! At the very moment she is animated against a history of oppression, a history which Levinas's feminine may unwittingly repeat, she invokes the Levinasian scandal within her project. She I think underlines for us, along with Bernasconi and Drabinski, the urgent task of contemporary Levinas scholarship: `the question of how politics stands in relation to Levinas's philosophy in general' (p. 331). Can there be a notion of recognition, institution, and so forth that would not be violent in the manner Levinas and Chanter hint? Are there ways in which institutions perpetrate violence which Levinas never thematized? This volume displays some promising gestures in these directions. Indeed, as a compendium of critical trajectories in English language Levinas scholarship, this book is a must read.

Excellent secondary sources were a hallmark of postwar scholarship. Many of the finest minds devoted themselves to introducing for general readers the intellectual worlds of the past (Tillyard, Hollander), and the complex thought of individual writers and movements (Barrett, Heller). Numerous factors seem to have conspired to undermine the prevalence of that vital skill. The publish-or-perish academic culture drastically encouraged pedantic insularity and a virtually narcissistic hyperspecialization. Postmodernism's nihilistic insistence on mutually incomprehensible political solitudes undermined the will to clarity (as a bourgeois futility), at the same time exalting a baffling, obscurantist jargon.

Under the circumstances, it's scarcely surprising that the most complex thinkers of the era were as little understood as, simultaneously, they were lionized. Postmodernism's coarse party-line, "thinking otherwise," became a program of justifying non-reading with Derrida, media mysticism with Benjamin, and highly subjective non-listening with Adorno. Adorno in particular was ill served by grim translations, and tendentiously partial interpretations.

I think it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Alex Thomson's excellent study, together with the appearance of new and excellent translations by Robert Hullot-Kentor, will rectify at last this distorted situation. Unlike so many readers of Adorno, Thomson is truly comfortable talking about both music (and art) and philosophy. Especially in North America, the rule has been one or the other. As Thomson so eloquently explains, Adorno is virtually incomprehensible on that basis. Any vestige of the "common sense" distinction between artistic and philosophical experience will perforce render Adorno's thought trivial.

Thomson has the necessary education and breadth of perspective to understand Adorno's own radical breadth, his fundamental rethinking of supposedly generic categories of experience. Adorno's passionately careful effort this way has become, in North American hands, the vulgar tossing of all dimensions of experience into a single political pot. Thomson makes spectacularly clear just how far Adorno really is from the idiotic nostrum "everything is political."

Like all truly good secondary sources, this book not only provides a fair and balanced introduction, but stakes significant interpretive claims of its own. His brief for the importance of Kant for Adorno is especially impressive. As more of Adorno's work becomes available (in German as well as English), it becomes clearer that Adorno stands very far from the simplistic contradistinction of his friend Max Horkheimer between "Traditional and Critical theory." Above all, the abrupt separation of (outdated) cultural past from ("relevant") contemporary immediacy is profoundly alien to Adorno. Thomson carefully exposes the complexity of Adorno's real attitudes, and their irreducible dialectical richness.

For Adorno's thought--like Derrida's and that of his great antipode, Heidegger--cannot be summarized, paraphrased, or reduced to axiomatic slogans. What it can be, in the hands of a dedicated soul like Alex Thomson, is very well introduced. Without question, this book is a superb realization of that daunting task. And I've saved the best for last: Thomson's prose is exceptionally clear and intelligent. Though he writes nothing like Adorno himself, Thomson's lucid style is an excellent, even ideal preparation for Adorno's own writing. Like Freud (or, again, Derrida or Heidegger), Adorno is in fact a virtuoso writer himself. Once one has become used to his idiom, and the genuine profundity of what he has to say, reading Adorno is as stimulating as it is rewarding.

In sum, this is a marvelous book, and it does a great service to contemporary readers, to philosophy--and to academic culture, which will become obliged to rethink its obscurantist priorities, shamed by superlative clarity such as this.

MW Morse