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Eric S. Nelson: Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other

New York: State University of New York Press, 2020, $34.95 pbk, 459 pp + Index

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Notes

  1. That is, in spite of Habermas and Honneth’s separate effort to rejuvenate “historical materialism”.

  2. The term “intermateriality” appeals to the dual sense of materiality that is employed throughout the work. Materiality signifies both the embodied ethical sensitivity of the self and the incarnate, vulnerable body of the others.

  3. In this light, Nelson employs the term ethics to denote both the narrower Levinasian sense of a pre-political responsibility towards other, but also the boarder sense that draws closer to common second-order normative ethics.

  4. Honneth, despite the insistence that his struggle of recognition is to be differentiated from Hobbes’s struggle of self-preservation, does invite this view. This is particularly clear in his discussion of how Hegel’s theory of recognition is appropriated from Hobbes (see Honneth, 1995: 10).

  5. Adorno, similarly, criticized the “whole philosophy of inwardness” for its “priority of the self” (Adorno, 1974: 155).

  6. Nelson is correct in suggesting that Adorno and Levinas overlaps on the idea of negative dialectic. In fact, whereas Levinas rejects the language of negativity in Totality and Infinity (see Levinas, 1979: 40–42), he later remarks, albeit only in footnote, of the ethical anarchy as “making possible moments of negation without any affirmation” (Levinas, 1981: 101n3).

  7. Nevertheless, the imperfectionist model is different from early Derrida’s rhetoric in Violence and Metaphysics, where violence is portrayed as inevitable or even excused as a “secondary war” to “repress the worst violence” (Derrida, 2001: 162).

References

  • Adorno, T. W. (1974). Minima moralia: Reflections on a damaged life. (E. F. N. Jephcott, Trans.). Verso.

  • Derrida, J. (2001). Violence and metaphysics. In Alan Bass (Trans.), Writing and difference. University of Chicago Press.

  • Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action (Vol. 1). Beacon Press.

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  • Honneth, A. (1995). The Struggle for recognition: The moral grammar of social conflicts. MIT Press.

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  • Levinas, E. (1979). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority. (Alphonso Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne University Press.

  • Levinas, E. (1981). Otherwise than being or beyond essence. (Alphonso Lingis, Trans.). Nijhoff.

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  1. The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Kelvin Ka Ho Li

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Li, K.K.H. Eric S. Nelson: Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other. Hum Stud 45, 389–395 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-022-09626-6

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