Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others

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Fordham Univ Press, 2006 - Philosophy - 566 pages

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

From inside the book

Contents

IV
11
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29
VII
45
VIII
61
IX
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XXIX
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XXX
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XXXI
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XXXIII
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XXXV
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XXXVI
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XXXVII
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XII
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XXII
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XXIII
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XXIV
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XXVII
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XXVIII
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XXXVIII
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XXXIX
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XL
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Copyright

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Popular passages

Page 289 - Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?
Page 4 - What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an overgoing and a down-going.
Page 369 - And as soon as he came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses' anger burned hot, and he threw the tables out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain.
Page 26 - And the LORD spake unto you out of the midst of the fire : ye heard the voice of the words, but saw no similitude ; only ye heard a voice.
Page 266 - The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance, To designate it, we should need the old term 'element,' in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio, temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being, The flesh is in this sense an 'element...
Page 203 - In the tabernacle of the congregation without the veil, which is before the testimony, Aaron and his sons shall order it from evening to morning before the Lord: it shall be a statute for ever unto their generations on the behalf of the children of Israel.
Page 48 - ego" that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven it away. It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter's rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master.
Page 139 - The Ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface." [ie, the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body.
Page 355 - A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms - in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people...

About the author (2006)

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).

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