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The Inhuman Condition - Looking for Difference after Levinas and Heidegger (Paperback, 2004 ed.)
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The Inhuman Condition - Looking for Difference after Levinas and Heidegger (Paperback, 2004 ed.)
Series: Phaenomenologica, 175
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At the origin of this volume, a simple question: what to make of
that surprisingly monotonous series of statements produced by our
societies and our philosophers that all converge in one theme - the
importance of difference? To clarify the meaning of the difference
at stake here, we have tried to rephrase it in terms of the two
major and mutually competing paradigms provided by the history of
phenomenology only to find both of them equally unable to
accommodate this difference without violence. Neither the ethical
nor the ontological approach can account for a subject that insists
on playing a part of its own rather than following the script
provided for it by either Being or the Good. What appears to be,
from a Heideggerian or Levinasian perspective, an unwillingness to
open up to what offers to deliver us from the condition of
subjectivity is analysed in these pages as a structure in its own
right. Far from being the wilful, indifferent and irresponsive
being its critics have portrayed it to be, the so-called
'postmodern' subject is essentially finite, not even able to assume
the transcendence to which it owes its singularity. This inability
is not a lack - it points instead to a certain unthought shared by
both Heidegger and Levinas which sets the terms for a discussion no
longer our own. Instead of blaming Heidegger for underdeveloping
'being-with', we should rather stress that his account of mineness
may be, in the light of contemporary philosophy, what stands most
in need of revision. And, instead of hailing Levinas as the critic
whose stress on the alterity of the Other corrects Heidegger's
existential solipsism, the problems into which Levinas runs in
defining that alterity call for a different diagnosis and a
corresponding change in the course that phenomenology has taken
since. Instead of preoccupying itself with the invisible, we should
focus on the structures of visibility that protect us from its
terror. The result? An account of difference that is neither
ontological nor ethical, but 'me-ontological', and that can help us
understand some of the problems our societies have come to face
(racism, sexism, multiculturalism, pluralism). And, in the wake of
this, an unexpected defence of what is at stake in postmodernism
and in the question it has refused to take lightly: who are we?
Finally, an homage to Arendt and Lyotard who, if read through each
other's lenses, give an exact articulation to the question with
which our age struggles: how to think the 'human condition' once
one realizes that there is an 'inhuman' side to it which, instead
of being its mere negation, turns out to be that without which it
would come to lose its humanity?
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