Crossover Queries: Dwelling With Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others (perspectives In Continental Philosophy)

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 philosophythe thought of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, Janicaud, and othersto novels and artworks, music and dance, from traditional Jewish thought to Jain and Buddhist metaphysics, Wyschogrods 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

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 andBuddhist 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 negationsof 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

"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."--Publisher's website Drawing together pieces from over twenty years that reflect her penetrating thought, Crossover Queries presents, for the first time in a single volume, the astonishing range of a major philosopher. To explore the risks, ambiguities, and unstable conceptual situations of contemporary thought, it takes modes of negation, especially the negation intrinsic to the ethical, as its central thread. Ranging from twentieth-century European philosophy to traditional Jewish thought, from analyses of dance, music, and novels to the question of the name of God, from the phenomenology of the body to recent biological research, its profoundly learned and humanely engaged discussions remain always mindful that, even as philosophy crosses over into new spaces of thought, the philosopher remains standing within the responsible to a historical legacy, one conditioned by the negative 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, Wyschogrod. It also analyzes the negations of biological research and cultural images of mechanized and robotic bodies.