"This book sets up a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address today's environmental and social-political situation. The chapters focus on critical natural history and the environmental crisis (part 1), religion, prophecy, and the good (part 2), and an asymmetrical account of equality, liberty, and solidarity (part 3). Eric S. Nelson presents a critical ethics of the material other, addressing the alterities, non-identities, and the good that constitute, interrupt, and reorient ethical and social-political forms of life. This ethics of the material other has significant implications. First, the self is constituted through material and communicative relations to others in "other-constitution" rather than individual or collective self-constitution. Second, encounters with the prophetic "other-power" or transcendence of the good in others-in the ordinary mundanities and sufferings of immanent material life-disturb the economies of the individual ego relishing its own happiness and collective identities that codify themselves through the subjugation and refusal of non-human and human others. Finally, the infinite ethical and social-political demand of others calls for unrestricted solidarities that can transform ethical and social-political sensibilities, if always in relation to the material and communicative conditions of contemporary global capitalism"--.

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: On the Way to an Ethics of Material Others
  • Opening Reflections
    • Ethical Imperfection and the Priority of the Material Other
    • The Ethics of Alterity and the Negative Dialectics of Nonidentity
    • A Materialist Interpretation of Nonidentity and the Other
    • Other-Constitution and Aporetic Thinking
  • An Overview of the Work and Its Motivating Questions
    • Nature, Religion, and Justice
    • Perfection and Imperfection
    • Why Levinas? Why Adorno?
    • Three Queries about Ethics
  • Historical Contexts and Critical Departures
    • Marxism, Phenomenology, and New Critical Models
    • Cacophonies and Dissonances
    • Phenomenology and Antiphenomenology
  • Conclusion
• Part I After Nature: Ethics, Natural History, and Environmental Crisis
  • 1 Toward a Critical Ecological Model of Natural History
    • Introduction to Part One
    • Natural History and the Politics of Nature
    • Natural History and a Nature Still to Come
    • The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Damaged Life, and the Contemporary Ecological Crisis
    • Aporetic Materialism and the Dialectic of Enlightenment
    • Conclusion and Transition
  • 2 Natural History, Nonidentity, and Ecological Crisis
    • Introduction: Kant, Constitutive Idealism, and the Mythology of Reason
    • Communicative Idealism or Natural History?
    • Nature as Ideology and Ethics
    • Historical Nature and Natural History
    • Materiality and a Critical Ethos of Nature
    • Conclusion
  • 3 Communicative Interaction or Natural History? Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature
    • Introduction: The Renunciation of Nature in Habermas and Hegel
    • Intersubjective Idealism in Habermas’s Critique of Adorno
    • Enlightenment and the Domination of Nature
    • The Asymmetrical Primacy and Intermateriality of the Object
    • Mimesis as Reification and Responsiveness
    • Art and Nature between Suffering and Happiness
    • Music, Listening, and the Ethical
    • Mending Natural History
    • Animality, Happiness, and the Promises of Damaged Life
  • 4 The Trouble with Life: Life-Philosophy, Antinaturalism, and Transcendence in Levinas
    • The Antinaturalism of Classical Phenomenology
    • Against Heidegger, Ontology, and Nature
    • Holy and Unholy Lands
    • Levinas, Heidegger, and Cryptonaturalism
    • Levinas and the Other-Transcendence of Life
    • Nature, Life, and History
    • Nature and Justice
    • Conclusion: Living beyond Idealism
  • 5 An Ethics of Nature at the End of Nature
    • Introduction: Nature and History
    • Disturbing Nature: Levinas and the Ethics of Other Animals
    • Natural Histories: Adorno on Animals and Environments
    • Adorno and the Culture of Nature
    • Ethical Responsiveness, Imperfectionism, and Minimalism
    • Conclusion and Transition to Part Two
• Part II Unsettling Religion: Suffering, Prophecy, and the Good
  • 6 Religion, Suffering, and Damaged Life: Nietzsche, Marx, and Adorno
    • Introduction to Part Two
    • Religion as and against Power
    • Suffering and the Truth and Untruth of Religion
    • Between Marx and Nietzsche: Religion and Damaged Life
    • Priestly Powers, Damaged Lives, and Imperfectionist Promises of Happiness
    • Religion, Oppression, and Prophecy
    • Conclusion and Transition
  • 7 The Disturbance of the Ethical: Kierkegaard, Levinas, and Abraham’s Binding of Isaac
    • Introduction
    • “Here I Am” in an Intercultural Context
    • Confronting Abraham
    • The Suspension or the Provocation of the Ethical?
    • Is the Ethical or the Religious Primary?
    • Interlude: Levinas, Moore, and the Priority of the Good
    • Aporetic Ethics in Early Daoism, Kierkegaard, and Levinas
    • Conclusion: Contesting Conventional Morality
  • 8 Ethics between Religiosity and Secularity: Kierkegaard and Levinas
    • Introduction
    • Questioning Levinas Questioning Kierkegaard
    • In a Prophetic Voice
    • Pluralism, Religion, and Faith
    • Abraham, Isaac, and the Ends of the Ethical
    • Adorno, Kierkegaard, Levinas
    • Demystifying Levinas: Must One Be Religious to Be Ethical?
    • Between Religiosity and Antireligiosity
    • Conclusion: Double Strategies in Levinas and Kierkegaard
  • 9 Prophetic Time, Materiality, and Dignity: Bloch and Levinas
    • Introduction: Marxism and Dignity
    • Marxism between Dignity and Happiness
    • Luxemburg, Bloch, and Democratic Socialism
    • The History and Paradox of Dignity
    • Natural Law and Prophetic Critique
    • Prophetic Temporalities
    • Politics and the Dialectic of Dignity
    • A Dusselian Interpretation of Bloch and Levinas
    • A Concluding Note on Adorno
  • 10 Ethical Imperfectionism and the Sovereignty of Good: Levinas, Løgstrup, and Murdoch
    • Introduction
    • Responding to Philosophies of Life, Existence, and Being
    • The Problem of Moral Perfectionism
    • Ethical Decision or Ethical Demand?
    • The Ethics of Demand
    • The Immanence and Transcendence of the Good: Murdoch, Løgstrup, and Levinas
    • Naturalism, Antinaturalism, and Life’s Sovereign Expressions
    • The Good of Ethical Life and the Good beyond Being
    • Suffering, Useless Suffering, and Theodicy
    • Conclusion and Transition to Part Three
• Part III Demanding Justice: Asymmetrical Ethics and Critical Social Theory
  • 11 Equality, Justice, and Asymmetrical Ethics
    • Introduction to Part Three
    • Asymmetry and Equality
    • Equality and Freedom
    • Habermas, Honneth, and the Problematic of Asymmetry
    • The Good, the Just, and the Material Other
    • Are Equality and Asymmetry Incompatible?
    • Ethics beyond the Dialectic of Recognition and Misrecognition
    • Conclusion
  • 12 The Pathologies of Freedom and the Promise of Autonomy
    • Introduction: The Problem of Freedom
    • Liberal and Neoliberal Freedom
    • The Ideological Functions of Freedom
    • Questionable Liberty
    • Asymmetrical Freedom
    • The Idolatry of Liberty and the Pathology of Freedom
    • Fraternal Republicanism and the An-archic Republic
    • Conclusion: The Priority of the Freedom of the Other
  • 13 The Limits of Liberalism: Cosmopolitanism, Tolerance, and Asymmetrical Ethics
    • Introduction: Colonialism and the Aporias of Cosmopolitan Tolerance
    • The Complicity of Cosmopolitan Tolerance with Domination
    • Cosmopolitan Tolerance, Colonialism, and Racism
    • Love and Justice beyond Communitarianism and Liberalism
    • Hospitality, Substitution, and Tolerance
    • A Cosmopolitanism of the Other
    • Hospitality beyond Liberal Rights
    • Conclusion
  • 14 Recognition, Nonidentity, and the Contradictions of Liberalism
    • Introduction: The Crises of Contemporary Forms of Life
    • The Good and the Subject
    • Repeating the Question: Why Adorno? Why Levinas?
    • The Contradictions of Contemporary Liberalism
    • The Boundaries of Universalism and the Singularity of the Material Other
    • The Other in the Dialectic of Recognition and Misrecognition
    • Beyond Consensus and Recognition: The An-archic Ethics of Material Others
• Epilogue: Nourishing Life, Unrestricted Solidarity, and the Good
  • Against Perfection: Ethical Incompletion and the Good
  • The Ethical and the Political Demand
  • Critical Natural History and the Ethics of Materiality
  • Closing Words: Political Ecology and Political Economy
• Notes
• Bibliography
  • Works of Theodor W. Adorno
  • Works of Emmanuel Levinas
  • Other Works
• Index