The Ethics of Theory: Philosophy, History, Literature

✍ Scribed by Robert Doran

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 241
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In The Ethics of Theory, Robert Doran offers the first broad assessment of the ethical challenges of critical theory across the humanities and social sciences, calling into question the sharp dichotomy typically drawn between the theoretical and the ethical, the analytical and the prescriptive.
Individual chapters discuss the debate between Sartre and Lévi-Strauss over the ethical import of history; the “ethical turns” of Foucault and Derrida; the ethical ideal of Richard Rorty's “literary culture”; Hayden White's ethical historiography; the ethics of “conversion” in Sartrean existentialism and René Girard's theory of mimetic desire; the ethical humanism of Erich Auerbach's philology and Edward Said's postcolonial theory.

✦ Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
From Theory to ethics
Theory and the ethico-political turn
Part 1 Philosophy
Chapter 1 Ethics beyond existentialism and structuralism: Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and the debate with Lévi-Strauss
Sartre’s Critique and Lévi-Strauss’s The Elementary Structures
Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind and Sartre’s Critique
Chapter 2 Foucault’s “ethics of the self”
The roads to ethics
The “Ethics of the Self”: The 1981–82 lecture course
Ethics, politics, and freedom: Specters of Sartre
Chapter 3 Derrida in Heidelberg: The specter of Heidegger’s Nazism and the question of ethics
Derrida in Heidelberg
The philosophical meaning of Heidegger’s silence
Philosophy and Heidegger’s Nazism
The ethics of deconstruction/deconstructive ethics
Chapter 4 Richard Rorty’s “cultural politics”: Ironist philosophy and the ethics of reading
Rorty’s “literary culture”
The ethics of (novel) reading
Part 2 History
Chapter 5 Hayden White’s existentialist philosophy of history: Hayden White’s existentialist philosophy of history
White and Sartre: Choosing the past
White and Heidegger: The practical past
Existentialism in Metahistory: Tropology and emplotment
Existential figuralism
Chapter 6 Hayden White and the ethics of historiography
The ethics of Metahistory
Metahistorical ethics and the question of Holocaust representation
Part 3 Literature
Chapter 7 The ethics of conversion: Metaphysical desire in René Girard and Jean-Paul Sartre
Metaphysical desire
Conversion and authenticity
Chapter 8 The ethics of realism: Literary history and the sublime in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis
Chapter 9 The ethics of philology: Erich Auerbach and the fate of humanism
Chapter 10 Edward Said, Orientalism, and the “political turn” in literary and cultural studies
Orientalism, Foucault, and the ethics of theory
Reconsiderations: The “Afterword” to Orientalism
Notes
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Index