Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy) - Softcover

Wyschogrod, Edith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0823226077 ISBN 13: 9780823226078

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2006

Synopsis

Exploring the risks, ambiguities, and unstable conceptual worlds of contemporary thought, Crossover Queries brings together the wide-ranging writings, across twenty years, of one of our most important philosophers.

Ranging from twentieth-century European philosophy―the thought of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, Janicaud, and others―to novels and artworks, music and dance, from traditional Jewish thought to Jain and
Buddhist metaphysics, Wyschogrod’s work opens radically new vistas while remaining mindful that the philosopher stands within and is responsible to a philosophical legacy conditioned by the negative.

Rather than point to a Hegelian dialectic of overcoming negation or to a postmetaphysical exhaustion, Wyschogrod treats negative moments as opening novel spaces for thought. She probes both the desire for God and an ethics grounded in the interests of the other person, seeing these as moments both of crossing over and of negation. Alert to the catastrophes that have marked our times, she exposes the underlying logical structures of nihilatory forces that have been exerted to exterminate whole peoples. Analyzing the negations
of biological research and cultural images of mechanized and robotic bodies, she shows how they contest the body as lived in ordinary experience.

“Crossover Queries brings together important essays on a remarkable range of topics by one of our most insightful cultural critics. Commenting on philosophical and theological issues that have shaped the recent past as well as scientific and technological questions that will preoccupy us in the near future, Wyschogrod consistently alerts us to the urgency of problems whose importance few recognize. To avoid the challenge these essays pose is to avoid responsibility for a future that appears to be increasingly fragile.”―Mark C. Taylor, Columbia University

About this title

About the Author

Edith Wyschogrod is J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought emerita at Rice University. The most recent of her books are An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the Nameless Others; Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy; and a second edition of Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (Fordham).

Review

These studies...remind the scholar of religion that we do violence to religion if we think that we can domesticate it in some closed system or reductionistic mode of explanation. (―Journal of Ecumenical Studies)

Wyschogrod gathers together 32 philosophical essays produced over two decades, revealing the range of her thinking. (―SciTech Book News)

Crossover Queries brings together important essays on a remarkable range of topics by one of our most insightful cultural critics. Commenting on philosophical and theological issues that have shaped the recent past as well as scientific and technological questions that will preoccupy us in the near future, Wyschogrod consistently alerts us to the urgency of problems whose importance few recognize. To avoid the challenge these essays pose is to avoid responsibility for a future that appears to be increasingly fragile. (―Mark C. Taylor Columbia University)

. . . demonstrates the impressively wide-ranging and unflinchingly engaged work of Edith Wyschogrod. (―Theology, Ethics and Philosophy)

Edition details

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0823226077
• ISBN 13: 9780823226078
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 592