Contemporary Continental Ethics – serie

One of the first readings, in English or French, of Edouard Glissant as an ethical theorist Brings together Caribbean and Latin American ethics to provide a new concept of responsibility that addresses inequities rooted in colonial projectsRe-envisions contemporary human rights practice based on the duties entailed in the decolonial (third-generation) rights claims made by the dispossessedConnects Glissant's claim of a 'right to opacity' to ethical bearings, and by doing so presents a path for human rights and decolonial movements to come togetherWhat do we in the West owe those who grow our food, sew our clothes and produce our electronics? And what have we always owed one another, but forgotten, avoided, or simply disregarded?Looking back on nearly a century of colonial war and genocide, in 1990 the poet and philosopher douard Glissant appealed directly to his readers, calling them to re-orient their lives in service of the political struggles of their time: 'You must choose your bearing'.Informed by the prayer camps at Standing Rock, and presenting Glissant alongside Stuart Hall, Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, Enrique Dussel, Gloria Anzald a and W. E. B. Du Bois, this book offers an urgent ethics for the present - an ethics of risk, commitment and care that together form a new sense of decolonial responsibility.

What do we in the West owe those who grow our food, sew our clothes and produce our electronics? And what have we always owed one another, but forgotten, avoided, or simply disregarded? Looking back on nearly a century of colonial war and genocide, in 1990 the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant appealed directly to his readers, calling them to re-orient their lives in service of the political struggles of their time: ‘You must choose your bearing.’ Informed by the prayer camps at Standing Rock, and presenting Glissant alongside Stuart Hall, Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, Enrique Dussel, Gloria Anzaldúa and W. E. B. Du Bois, this book offers an urgent ethics for the present – an ethics of risk, commitment and care that together form a new sense of decolonial responsibility.

Is there a way of being human that could invite people away from today's models of violence and consumerism? Looking forward to a new, increasingly creolized century, in 1997 the Martinican poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant asked, 'Do we have the right and the means to live another dimension of humanity? But how?'Building on the defense of human rights he outlined in Choose Your Bearing, Benjamin P. Davis traces figures of 'the human' and 'humanity' in W. E. B. Du Bois, Edouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter and Edward Said. He concludes with a reflection on Hannah Arendt's post-war correspondence with Karl Jaspers, which offers lessons for a new humanism as we witness ongoing wars today.

Is there a way of being human that could invite people away from today’s models of violence and consumerism? Looking forward to a new, increasingly creolized century, in 1997 the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant asked, ‘Do we have the right and the means to live another dimension of humanity? But how?’Building on the defense of human rights he outlined in Choose Your Bearing, Benjamin P. Davis traces figures of 'the human' and ‘humanity' in W. E. B. Du Bois, Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter and Edward Said. He concludes with a reflection on Hannah Arendt’s post-war correspondence with Karl Jaspers, which offers lessons for a new humanism as we witness ongoing wars today.

Estelle Ferrarese shows us that ethical consumerism collaborates with the very order it seeks to break. Today’s spread of consumer practices advocating ‘fair’ prices or ‘responsible’ purchases is grounded in a supposed critique of capitalism at the level of everyday life. This book runs counter to the prevailing view.Ferrarese argues that ethical consumerism conceals the fact that the market perpetually undoes any of the moral standards that are injected into it. Arguments for ethical consumerism incorrectly suppose that capitalism can be reduced to psychological mechanisms, such as an apparently predatory temperament, mechanisms that can then be curbed by the upholding of virtues.Practices of ethical consumerism invest individual intention with absolute mastery over the world, with a boundless ability to reshape it. And given ethical consumerism’s want to put a figure on everything – from damages to virtuous behaviour – it ends up contributing to the very form imposed on the world by the market, namely generalised commensurability.

Staging a fruitful dialogue between the analytic and Continental philosophical traditions, while reflecting specifically on the work of Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, Serres and Nancy, Lueck offers a creative new approach to the problem of moral obligation. Lueck builds on Immanuel Kant’s fact of reason – the idea that being a moral subject necessarily presupposes ones having accepted the bindingness of obligation – to show that it must be rethought as the fact of sense.

Staging a fruitful dialogue between the analytic and Continental philosophical traditions, while reflecting specifically on the work of Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, Serres and Nancy, Lueck offers a creative new approach to the problem of moral obligation. Lueck builds on Immanuel Kant’s fact of reason – the idea that being a moral subject necessarily presupposes ones having accepted the bindingness of obligation – to show that it must be rethought as the fact of sense.

Estelle Ferrarese argues for an understanding of morality that is materialist and political. Taking the Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor W. Adorno as a point of departure, she questions his social philosophy by submitting it to ideas deriving from theories of care. She thinks through the mechanisms of the social fragility of caring for others, the moral gestures it enjoins, as well as its political stakes. Ferrarese shows that the capitalist form of life, strained by a generalised indifference, produces a compartmentalised attention to others, one limited to very particular tasks and domains and attributed to women. Offering a systematic study of the idea of 'coldness' in Adorno's philosophy, she stages a dialogue between Adornian Critical Theory and the ethics of care. In doing so, Ferrarese approaches old questions in a new light in a bid to give dignity to the singular, to make its specific claims and its moral pertinence heard.