Mortal Subjects

Passions of the Soul in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7456-5275-7
Verlag: Polity Press

Buch, Englisch, 244 Seiten, Format (B × H): 147 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 431 g

This wide ranging and challenging book explores the relationship between subjectivity and mortality as it is understood by a number of twentieth-century French philosophers including Sartre, Lacan, Levinas and Derrida. Making intricate and sometimes unexpected connections, Christina Howells draws together the work of prominent thinkers from the fields of phenomenology and existentialism, religious thought, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, focussing in particular on the relations between body and soul, love and death, desire and passion.

From Aristotle through to contemporary analytic philosophy and neuroscience the relationship between mind and body (psyche and soma, consciousness and brain) has been persistently recalcitrant to analysis, and emotion (or passion) is the locus where the explanatory gap is most keenly identified. This problematic forms the broad backdrop to the work’s primary focus on contemporary French philosophy and its attempts to understand the intimate relationship between subjectivity and mortality, in the light not only of the ‘death’ of the classical subject but also of the very real frailty of the subject as it lives on, finite, desiring, embodied, open to alterity and always incomplete. Ultimately Howells identifies this vulnerability and finitude as the paradoxical strength of the mortal subject and as what permits its transcendence.

Subtle, beautifully written, and cogently argued, this book will be invaluable for students and scholars interested in contemporary theories of subjectivity, as well as for readers intrigued by the perennial connections between love and death.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Howells, Christina

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Moderne Philosophische Disziplinen Dekonstruktivismus, Strukturalismus, Poststrukturalismus
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychologie / Allgemeines & Theorie Psychologische Theorie, Psychoanalyse
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie Westliche Philosophie: 20./21. Jahrhundert
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Moderne Philosophische Disziplinen Existenzphilosophie, Lebensphilosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionsphilosophie, Philosophische Theologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Moderne Philosophische Disziplinen Phänomenologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Religionsphilosophie, Philosophische Theologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements vi

Abbreviations vii

1 Introduction: Love and Death 1

2 Phenomenology of Emotion and Forgetfulness of Death 24
Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir

3 Religious Philosophy: Keeping Body and Soul Together 69
Gabriel Marcel, Paul Ricoeur, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Emmanuel Levinas

4 Psychoanalytic Thought: Eros and Thanatos, Psyche and Soma 127
Jacques Lacan, Didier Anzieu, Julia Kristeva

5 The Deconstruction of Dualism: Death and the Subject 175
Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy

Epilogue 216

Notes 228

Bibliography 244

Index 259

Über Autor(innen)

Howells, Christina
Christina Howells is professor of French at the University of Oxford and fellow of Wadham College.