"Strange Wonder" confronts Western philosophy's ambivalent
relationship to the Platonic "wonder" that reveals the strangeness
of the everyday. On the one hand, this wonder is said to be the
origin of all philosophy. On the other hand, it is associated with
a kind of ignorance that ought to be extinguished as swiftly as
possible. By endeavoring to resolve wonder's indeterminacy into
certainty and calculability, philosophy paradoxically secures
itself at the expense of its own condition of possibility.
"Strange Wonder" locates a reopening of wonder's primordial
uncertainty in the work of Martin Heidegger, for whom wonder is
first experienced as the shock at the groundlessness of things and
then as an astonishment that things nevertheless "are." Mary-Jane
Rubenstein traces this double movement through the thought of
Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida, ultimately
thematizing wonder as the awesome, awful opening that exposes
thinking to devastation as well as transformation. Rubenstein's
study shows that wonder reveals the extraordinary in and through
the ordinary, and is therefore crucial to the task of reimagining
political, religious, and ethical terrain.
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