Crossover Queries

Abstract

Exploring the risks, ambiguities, and unstable conceptual worlds of contemporary thought, this book brings together the wide-ranging writings, across twenty years, of one of our most important philosophers. Ranging from 20th-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, this book 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, the book treats negative moments as opening novel spaces for thought. It 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, it 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, it shows how they contest the body as lived in ordinary experience.