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The Continental Ethics Reader
New
- GenresPhilosophy
Paperback
First published April 25, 2003
76 people want to read
About the author
Matthew Calarco
18 books8 followersMatthew Calarco is Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University Fullerton, USA.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 21, 2008
I won't say it wasn't a struggle. High points, perhaps THE high point, includes FINALLY reading 'The Laugh of the Medusa' (which, okay, I didn't read in *this* book exactly, since I didn't want to read an excerpt): I note my sense that queer theory has caught up to this essay only in the last few years, and also that Cixous saves Bataille's 'Notion of Expenditure' by untethering it from the agon or any other telos. I don't want to complain (too much? at all?) about their selections, their editings, but *how* could they leave out Cixous's "At the end of a more or less conscious computation, she finds not her sum but her differences. I am for you what you want me to be at the moment you look at me in a way you've never seen me before: at every instant." Sheesh.
What else would I change? First, I'd make it more like a Norton Anthology. There are no notes but the notes provided by the authors themselves--all of whom, barring, say, the plainspeaking Habermas or Rorty--assume we'll get all their jokes. So: more notes, *especially* for our impossible writers. Who can complain about the impenetrability of modern theory after the failure of reading Hegel (Lacan, at least, pretends to have a personality)? And how can we get the BwO of Anti-Oedipus unless the notes contextualize it with the other BwO of Thousand Plateaus? Second, I might arrange it by topic instead of by school. After all, it's not the -isms that destroy traditional metaphysics: it's the new ways of asking questions, all of which open holes in multiple places beneath all previous sites of confidence, above all, the site of the Singular Rule.
I've noticed the demand for anteriority in so many of these thinkers: so many want to find the thing before. Thankfully, a few of our thinkers--Derrida, chiefly--do the anterior thing less to get before than to come at us *from behind.* I'm sure someone else has done the sexual reading of this tendency.
What else would I change? First, I'd make it more like a Norton Anthology. There are no notes but the notes provided by the authors themselves--all of whom, barring, say, the plainspeaking Habermas or Rorty--assume we'll get all their jokes. So: more notes, *especially* for our impossible writers. Who can complain about the impenetrability of modern theory after the failure of reading Hegel (Lacan, at least, pretends to have a personality)? And how can we get the BwO of Anti-Oedipus unless the notes contextualize it with the other BwO of Thousand Plateaus? Second, I might arrange it by topic instead of by school. After all, it's not the -isms that destroy traditional metaphysics: it's the new ways of asking questions, all of which open holes in multiple places beneath all previous sites of confidence, above all, the site of the Singular Rule.
I've noticed the demand for anteriority in so many of these thinkers: so many want to find the thing before. Thankfully, a few of our thinkers--Derrida, chiefly--do the anterior thing less to get before than to come at us *from behind.* I'm sure someone else has done the sexual reading of this tendency.
November 13, 2011
This is an excellent anthology on ethics in contemporary "Continental" or European philosophy. It includes representative figures from all the major schools of thought including phenomenology, existentialism, The Frankfurt School, post-structuralism, feminism, and psychoanalysis. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in getting a big picture of how moral philosophy is approached by the most influential thinkers in 20th century European philosophy.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews