A philosophical treatment of Édouard Glissant’s poetry and critical work, examining how the historical experience of the Middle Passages transforms notions of time, memory, embodiment, subjectivity, poetics, and the nature of intellectual work. Puts Glissant’s work in conversation with European critical theory, phenomenology, and mid-century Caribbean thought in order to underscore his unique contribution to philosophy and cultural theory.
TOC :: Preface / Introduction: Between Europe and the Americas / 1. Memory Root Abyss / 2. Memory Future Abyss / 3. Ontology of an Abyssal Subject / 4. Aesthetics of an Abyssal Subject / 5. Thinking and Building / Acknowledgements
A critical re-assessment of Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics and politics, reading his work in the context of postcolonial theory. With a focus on key figures from the global south, including Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Édouard Glissant, and Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos among others, the book reads Levinasian alterity in the context of colonial history and logic, identifying the Eurocentric limits of Levinas’ thought while also gesturing toward decolonial possibilities of an ethics of the Other.
TOC. :: Acknowledgements / Preface / Introduction: Decolonizing Levinasian Ethics / 1. Incarnate Historiography and the Problem of Method / 2. Epistemological Fracture / 3. The Ontology of Fracture / 4. Ethics of Entanglement. / 5. Decolonizing Levinasian Politics / Concluding Remarks
Winner of the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Frantz Fanon Book Prize (2014).
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This book reads a series of Godard films as interventions in contemporary debate about the language of difference. Godard has something he wants both to preserve (singularity) and destroy (visual and aural totalitarianism). How is it possible to speak about the Other? How is it possible for the Other to speak? Does all speaking about or by the Other render that speaking common, thereby rendering what is different identical? These questions gather together a number of issues that cross and intersect disciplinary boundaries: signification, representation, ethics, politics, and so on.
TOC :: Introduction: Cinema as a Kind of Philosophy / 1. The Other on Loan: Two or Three Things I Know About Her / 2. Dead Time and the Image in Ici et ailleurs / 3. The Cinematic Empiricism of Comment ca va? / 4. Second, Third: Numéro Deux / 5. Histoire(s) of Memory
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The standard account of Emmanuel Levinas’s work assumes his distance from classical phenomenology. Sensibility and Singularity contends that Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology was a vital, living resource throughout Levinas’ philosophical career. What emerges in this book is a thorough account of Levinas’s constant and productive debate with the Husserlian tradition of phenomenology.
TOC :: Introduction. /. 1. Unsuspected Horizons: On the Husserl Question / 2. The Subject outside Itself: Transcendence and Materiality in the 1940s and 1950s / 3. The Subject in Question: Relation and Sense in Totality and Infinity / 4. Sensation, Trace, Enigma: Rethinking Sensibility in the 1960s / 5. Impressions of Sense: Materiality in Otherwise than Being