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Throwing the Moral Dice
Ethics and the Problem of Contingency
Just Ideas
Edited by Thomas Claviez and Viola Marchi
Foreword by Alain Badiou
Contributions by Étienne Balibar, Rosi Braidotti, Thomas Claviez, Drucilla Cornell, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Viola Marchi, Michael Naas, Cary Wolfe and Slavoj Zizek
Published by: Fordham University Press
272 pages, 152.00 x 228.00 mm, 2 b/w illustrations
More than a purely philosophical problem, straddling the ambivalent terrain between necessity and impossibility, contingency has become the very horizon of everyday life. Often used as a synonym for the precariousness of working conditions under neoliberalism, for the unknown threats posed by terrorism, or for the uncertain future of the planet itself, contingency needs to be calculated and controlled in the name of the protection of life.
The overcoming of contingency is not only called upon to justify questionable mechanisms of political control; it serves as a central legitimating factor for Enlightenment itself. In this volume, nine major philosophers and theorists address a range of questions around contingency and moral philosophy. How can we rethink contingency in its creative aspects, outside the dominant rhetoric of risk and dangerous exposure? What is the status of contingency—as the unnecessary and law-defying—in or for ethics? What would an alternative “ethics of contingency”—one that does not simply attempt to sublate it out of existence—look like?
The volume tackles the problem contingency has always posed to both ethical theory and dialectics: that of difference itself, in the difficult mediation between the particular and the universal, same and other, the contingent singularity of the event and the necessary generality of the norms and laws.
From deconstruction to feminism to ecological thought, some of today’s most influential thinkers reshape many of the most debated concepts in moral philosophy: difference, agency, community, and life itself.
Contributors: Étienne Balibar, Rosi Braidotti, Thomas Claviez, Drucilla Cornell, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Viola Marchi, Michael Naas, Cary Wolfe, Slavoj Žižek
Foreword: Ethics and Contingency
Alain Badiou | ix
Introduction" Throwing the Moral Dice: Ethics 2.0, Contingency, and Dialectics
Thomas Claviez and Viola Marchi | 1
I Throwing the Moral Dice: Ethics and/of Contingency
Three Notes on Contingency Today: Stress, Science—and Consolation from the Past?
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht | 33
Cosmopolitan Ethics as an Ethics of Contingency: Toward a Metonymic Community
Thomas Claviez | 45
Dumb Luck: Jacques Derrida and the Problem of Contingency
Michael Naas | 69
The Apophatic Community: Ethics, Contingency, Negation
Viola Marchi | 94
II Other Others: Ethics 2.0 and the Problem of the “Unsynthesizable”
Commonality versus Individuality: An Ethical Dilemma?
Étienne Balibar | 127
Critique, Power, and the Ethics of Affirmation
Rosi Braidotti | 145
The Promise of Practical Philosophy and Institutional Innovation
Drucilla Cornell | 162
Ethics of Circular Time
Slavoj Žižek | 182
The Road Not Taken: Environmental Ethics, Reciprocity, and Non-Negative Nonagency
Thomas Claviez | 206
“There Is No World”: Living Life in Deconstruction and Theoretical Biology
Cary Wolfe | 229
Works Cited | 251
List of Contributors | 269
Index | 273
Thomas Claviez is Professor for Literary Theory at the University of Bern, where he is responsible for the MA program in World Literature. He is the author of Grenz fälle: Mythos- Ideologie- American Studies (1998) and Aesthetics and Ethics: Otherness and Moral Imagination from Aristotle to Levinas and from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to House Made of Dawn (2008) and the coauthor, with Dietmar Wetzel, of Zur Aktualität von Jacques Rancière (2016). He has published widely on issues of community, recognition, literary theory, and moral philosophy. He is the editor of The Conditions of Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics on the Threshold of the Possible (2013) and of The Common Growl: Towards a Poetics of Precarious Community (2016) and the coeditor of Aesthetic Transgressions: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature (2006) and of Critique of Authenticity (2019). He is currently working on a monograph with the title A Metonymic Community? Towards a New Poetics of Contingency.
Viola Marchi is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern. She studied English and Italian literatures at the University of Pisa and the University of Bern, receiving her PhD in English from the latter in 2019, with a dissertation titled “Fuori Luogo: Community and the Impropriety of the Common.” In 2016, with support of the Swiss National Science Foundation, she was a visiting fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. She has published the articles “Ethics, Interrupted: Community and Impersonality in Levinas” (2015) and “The Alienation of the Common: A Look into the ‘Authentic’ Origin of Community” (2019). She is currently working on her first monograph.
Bruno Bosteels is Professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.
Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor and Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University. She is the founder of the interuniversity SOCRATES network NOISE and of the Thematic Network for Women’s Studies ATHENA, which she directed until 2005. Her research combines social and political theory, cultural politics, feminist theory, and ethnicity studies. She is the author of Patterns of Dissonance: A Study on Women in Contemporary Philosophy (1991), Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (1994), Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (2002), and Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (2006). Her latest publications, The Posthuman (2013) and Posthuman Knowledge (2019), call for a new type of critical knowledge, one able to address and challenge the intersections of power and violence, privilege and discrimination, arising out of human interactions.
Thomas Claviez is Professor for Literary Theory at the University of Bern, where he is responsible for the MA program in World Literature. He is the author of Grenz fälle: Mythos- Ideologie- American Studies (1998) and Aesthetics and Ethics: Otherness and Moral Imagination from Aristotle to Levinas and from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to House Made of Dawn (2008) and the coauthor, with Dietmar Wetzel, of Zur Aktualität von Jacques Rancière (2016). He has published widely on issues of community, recognition, literary theory, and moral philosophy. He is the editor of The Conditions of Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics on the Threshold of the Possible (2013) and of The Common Growl: Towards a Poetics of Precarious Community (2016) and the coeditor of Aesthetic Transgressions: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature (2006) and of Critique of Authenticity (2019). He is currently working on a monograph with the title A Metonymic Community? Towards a New Poetics of Contingency.
Drucilla Cornell is Professor Emerita of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University; Professor Extraordinaire at the University of Pretoria, South Africa; and a visiting professor at Birkbeck College, University of London. With a background in philosophy, law, and grassroots mobilization, she has played a central role in the organization of the memorable conferences on deconstruction and justice at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in 1989, 1990, and 1993. She is the author of The Philosophy of the Limit (1992), Feminism and Pornography (2000), and Law and Revolution in South Africa: uBuntu, Dignity, and the Struggle for Constitutional Transformation (2014). She has also coedited several books: Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender (1987), with Seyla Benhabib; and Hegel and Legal Theory (1991) and Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (1992), with David Gray Carlson and Michel Rosenfeld. She is part of a philosophical exchange with Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, and Nancy Fraser entitled Feminist Contentions (1995). In addition to her academic work, she has written four produced plays.
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature Emeritus at Stanford University. His books written in English include In 1926 (1998), Production of Presence (Stanford, 2004), In Praise of Athletic Beauty (2006), Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung (Stanford, 2012), After 1945 (Stanford, 2013), and Our Broad Present (2014).
Viola Marchi is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern. She studied English and Italian literatures at the University of Pisa and the University of Bern, receiving her PhD in English from the latter in 2019, with a dissertation titled “Fuori Luogo: Community and the Impropriety of the Common.” In 2016, with support of the Swiss National Science Foundation, she was a visiting fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. She has published the articles “Ethics, Interrupted: Community and Impersonality in Levinas” (2015) and “The Alienation of the Common: A Look into the ‘Authentic’ Origin of Community” (2019). She is currently working on her first monograph.
Cary Wolfe is Dunleive Professor of English at Rice University. He is author of Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside” and What Is Posthumanism? and editor of Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, all from Minnesota. He edits the Posthumanities series for Minnesota.