Ethics Of Alterity

Various art forms inscribe, program or perform the preference of relationship. In so doing, they put otherness high on their aesthetic agenda by caring about the cultural other, the other of gender, race, class or history. Such art forms from different periods promote a mode of sensibility to the other, whether the foreign or the invisible, or both, in their various manifestations. Sensibility to otherness is envisaged through the means of strident or humble art-forms and aesthetic choices, from the overtly experimental, to subdued adaptation. In confronting and welcoming the other art object, the other culture, or the othered citizen, art objects to the tyranny of the same and promotes such values as attentiveness, responsiveness and responsibility to forms of otherness, i.e. to the ways in which art cares about, or even takes care of the other. This implies the practice of an ethic of alterity (as distinct from the formulation of general rules) that is accountable for making the spectator or listener pay attention to social, economic and cultural invisibilities. Such an ethic of alterity joins hands with the political and may help chart the evolution of the objects and forms of engagement from the Victorian period to the present.

Ethics of Cinematic Experience: Screens of Alterity deals with the relationship between cinema and ethics from a philosophical perspective, finding an intrinsic connection between film spectatorship and the possibility of being open to different modes of alterity. The book’s main thesis is that openness to otherness is already found in the basic structures of cinematic experience. Through a close examination of the ethical relevance of the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Stanley Cavell, Emmanuel Levinas and Gilles Deleuze to cinema studies, Ethics of Cinematic Experience: Screens of Alterity pursues the question of how film can open the viewer to what is not her, and so bring her to encounter otherness in a way that is unique to cinematic experience. The book sees ethics as not just the subject, content or story of a film but part of its aesthetic structure. Accompanied by readings of films mainly from mainstream cinema, each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the encounter with alterity through cinema. The book gives particular attention to how theoretical discussion of the cinematic close-up can lead to ethical insights into the status of both the human and the non-human in film, and thus lead to an understanding of the relationships the viewer makes with them. The book is a helpful resource for students and scholars interested in the relationship between philosophy, film and ethics, and is appropriate for students of philosophy and media and cultural studies.

In Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity Weller argues through an analysis of the interrelated topics of translation, comedy, and gender that to read Beckett in this way is to miss the strangely 'anethical' nature of his work, as opposed to the notion that the literary event constitutes the affirmation of an alterity.

This work offers a new interpretation of what Levinas means when he says that we are infinitely responsible to the other person.

Argues that a coherent theory of ethics requires an account of selfhood.

An ethical reappraisal of postmodern and poststructuralist theory, including works by Levinas, Foucault, Derrida, Jameson, Zizek, and Butler.

This book is of interest for any reader wishing to explore the interface between literature, and critical and cultural theory. It investigates the notions of alterity which underlie the work of Lawrence Durrell and postmodernist theory. Grass (Irmgard Elsner Hunt).

""Every other is truly other, but no other is wholly other." This is the claim that Aspects of Alterity defends. Taking up the question of otherness that so fascinates contemporary continental philosophy, this book asks what it means for something or someone to be other than the self." "After a thorough assessment and critique of otherness in Levinas's and Marcel's work, including a discussion of the relationship of ethical alterity to theological assumption, Aspects of Alterity traces the transmission and development of these two conceptions of otherness. Ultimately, Aspects of Alterity makes a case for a hermeneutic account of otherness."--Jacket.