Arleen B. Dallery – författare

The core source of this book is the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Beginning with a chapter on speaking and the other, three lead chapters focus on Levinas' account of the face of the other. These chapters are followed by explorations of the ethics of dissemination in Derrida, the freedom of the other in Sartre, the cultural other in Husserlian phenomenology, the other as sexual difference in Irigaray and Nietzsche, the sublime in aesthetics, and the deconstruction of the primacy of the ego in Foucault and Lacan.This book is especially relevant to feminist theory. It shows that postmodern, continental philosophy does indeed have ethical implications. The question of the other or the presence of the other undercuts the foundationalist starting points of ethical theory and epistemology.The Question of the Other presents fresh and original interpretations of Husserl, Nietzsche, Derrida, Levinas, Irigaray, Foucault, Lacan, Heidegger, and Sartre.

This book punctuates the moments of crisis in continental thought from the foundational crisis of reason in Husserl's call for a rigorous science of phenomenology to the current crisis of postmodernism and its rejection of Husserl's metanarrative of history and rationality. The mediating links between these moments is the centrality of the epochal history of Being, the power of cultural and disciplinary practices, and the dispersal of meaning in the post-Husserlian and post-subjective philosophies of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and others.Included here are the thoughts of leading scholars who critically discuss Husserl's analysis of the crisis of Western thought and the importance of the concepts of "world" in Husserl's early writings. The authors analyze the deprivileging of philosophy as social critique through the text of Husserl, Habermas, Foucault, and recent feminist theory. They examine the end of the epistemological and morally autonomous subject in continental thought. Together, these thoughts articulate multiple points or moments of crisis without cure or end.

Ethics and Danger examines Heidegger's association with German National Socialism and attempts to understand both the question of politics in Heidegger's thought and the thought that gives rise to that question. It explores the contribution of Heidegger's work to issues of ethics, technology, and social theory, as well as his relationship to other thinkers such as Parmenides, Aristotle, Hegel, Husserl, Benjamin, Levinas, Rorty, Foucault, and Derrida. Finally, it addresses the more general question of the future of ethical thought within continental philosophy.In order to engage the ethical issues surrounding Heidegger's life and thought, the authors speak of dangers such as facism and the facile, self-congratulatory moral stance that Heidegger exemplifies. The question of how to speak in the wake of Heidegger's thought takes many forms, and the answers represent a diversity of viewpoints from both American and continental thinkers.