Description
Book SynopsisIdentifies the decisive moments in the development of the concept of responsibility, retrieves its origins, and explores the reflections on it. This book states that responsibility is less about a sovereign subject establishing a sphere of power and control than about exposure to an event that does not come from us and yet calls to us.
Trade ReviewRaffoul provides a rich genealogy of concepts of responsibility from thinkers in the Continental tradition. . . . Recommended.
* Choice *
Raffoul is very persuasive in arguing . . . that Sartre, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida's philosophies, even when apparently involved in other not immediately ethical pursuits – existentialism, fundamental ontology, metaphysics,deconstruction – contain a fundamentally ethical concern. . . . [A] very fine book.Nov. 2014
* Derrida Today *
Raffoul displays throughout considerable skills of reading and exegesis, and he has an important story to tell about the history of responsibility. . . . There is a great deal to admire in this book and one can only look forward to [his] future work.
* Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: The Origins of Responsibility
1. Aristotle and What Is "Up to Us": Responsibility as Voluntariness
2. Responsibility as Absolute Spontaneity: Kant and Transcendental Freedom
3. The Genealogy of Responsibility: Nietzsche's Deconstruction of Accountability
4. The Paradoxical Paroxysm of Responsibility: Sartre's Hyperbolic Responsibility
5. For The Other: Levinas' Reversal of Responsibility
6. Heidegger's Originary Ethics
7. Heidegger and the Ontological Origins of Responsibility
8. Derrida and the Impossible Origins of Responsibility
Conclusion: The Future of Responsibility: The Impossible and the Event
Notes
Index
