Writing the Politics of Difference

Edited by Hugh J. Silverman

Subjects: Philosophy
Series: SUNY series, Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
Paperback : 9780791404980, 372 pages, June 1991
Hardcover : 9780791404973, 372 pages, July 1991

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Table of contents

Introduction

Hugh J. Silverman

Acknowledgments

Part One: Rereading the Traditions of Difference in Continental Philosophy

I. Hegel and the Subversion of the System

1. Subversion of System/Systems of Subversion

Gary Shapiro

2. Essence and Subversion in Hegel and Heidegger

John McCumber

3. Hegel and the Subversion of System: Der Fall Adorno

Martin Donougho

II Kierkegaard: Faith as Action-Reaction

4. Kierkegaard's Stages on Life's Way: How Many Are There?

John M. Michelsen

5. Kierkegaard's Phenomenology of Faith as Suffering

Merold Westphal

6. Where There's A Will There's a Way: Kierkegaard's Theory of Action

C. Stephen Evans

III. Toward a Sartrean Ethics

7. Love and Perfect Coincidence in a Sartrean Ethics

Linda A. Bell

8. Authenticity, Conversion, and the City of Ends in Sartre's Notebooks for an Ethics

Thomas C. Anderson

9. "Making the Human" in Sartre's Unpublished Dialectical Ethics

Elizabeth A. Bowman and Robert K Stone

IV. Dialectic of Desire and Identity

10. Woman's Experience: Renaming the Dialectic of Desire and Recognition

Patricia J. Mills

11. Literature and Philosophy at the Crossroads: Proustian Subjects

Christie McDonald

12. Philosophy Becomes Autobiography: The Development of the Self in the Writings of Simone de Beauvoir

Jo-Ann Pilardi

Part Two: Writing Differences in Continental Philosophy

V. Dialogue and Difference

13. Dialogue and Discourses

Bernhard Waldenfels

14. Beyond Signifiers

M. C. Dillon

15. Merleau-Ponty and l'Écriture

Wayne J. Froman

VI. The Politics of Difference

16. Docile Bodies, Rebellious Bodies: Foucauldian Perspectives on Female Psychopathology

Susan Bordo

17. Sex, Gender, and the Politics of Difference

Eleanor H. Kuykendall

18. Rationality, Relativism, Feminism

Terry Winant

VII. Democracy and Social Change

19. Modern Democracy and Political Philosophy

Claude Lefort

20. The Political Origins of Democracy

Dick Howard

21. Art and Democracy in Habermas

Claude Piché

VIII. The Future of Continental Philosophy

22. The Future of Continental Philosophy

Joan Stambaugh

23. The Secularization of Philosophy

Gianni Vattimo

24. Translating the Differences: The Futures of Continental Philosophy

David Wood

Notes

Bibliography

Contributors

About the Editor

Index

Description

This book addresses various phases of continental philosophy, both in the context of its multiple traditions and in relation to the alternatives that mark the understanding of its present and future. Divided into two parts, the authors first focus on the diversity of traditions in continental philosophy in connection with the texts of Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and De Beauvoir. Second, they explore the reality of social, political, sexual, and philosophical differences, in connection with the writings of Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, Habermas, Heidegger, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Derrida, and Vattimo. They also stress the various theoretical foundations that manifest these differences.

Issues surrounding the role of philosophical systems, language, ethical choice, relations with others, the gendered body, socialization, and the status of philosophy today constitute the fabric of this book. The authors place these ideas in the context of current thought and current debates in continental philosophy and evaluate their significance for the future.

Hugh J. Silverman is Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the coeditor of Descriptions; Hermeneutics and Deconstruction; Critical and Dialectical Phenomenology; Postmodernism and Continental Philosophy; and The Textual Sublime: Deconstruction and Its Differences, all published by SUNY Press.