Nietzsche and Levinas

The essays that Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo collect in this volume locate multiple affinities between the philosophies of Nietzsche and Levinas. Both philosophers question the nature of subjectivity and the meaning of responsibility after the "death of God." While Nietzsche poses the dilemmas of a self without a ground and of ethics at a time of cultural upheaval and demystification, Levinas wrestles with subjectivity and the sheer possibility of ethics after the Shoah. Both argue that goodness exists independently of calculative reason& -for Nietzsche, goodness arises in a creative act moving beyond reaction and ressentiment; Levinas argues that goodness occurs in a spontaneous response to another person. In a world at once without God and haunted by multiple divinities, Nietzsche and Levinas reject transcendental foundations for politics and work toward an alternative vision encompassing a positive sense of creation, a complex fraternity or friendship, and rival notions of responsibility.Stauffer and Bergo group arguments around the following debates, which are far from settled: What is the reevaluation of ethics (and life) that Nietzsche and Levinas propose, and what does this imply for politics and sociality? What is a human subject& -and what are substance, permanence, causality, and identity, whether social or ethical& -in the wake of the demise of God as the highest being and the foundation of what is stable in existence? Finally, how can a "God" still inhabit philosophy, and what sort of name is this in the thought of Nietzsche and Levinas?

Acknowledgments Abbreviations of Texts by Nietzsche and Levinas Introduction Bettina Bergo and Jill Stauffer Part I. Revaluing Ethics: Time, Teaching, and the Ambiguity of Forces 1. The Malice in Good Deeds, by Alphonso Lingis 2. The Imperfect: Levinas, Nietzsche, and the Autonomous Subjec, by Jill Stauffer 3. Nietzsche and Levinas: The Impossible Relation , by John-Michel Longneaux 4. Ethical Ambivalence, by Judith Butler 5. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Thus Listened the Rabbis: Philosophy, Education, and the Cycle of Enlightenment, by Claire Elise Katz Part II. The Subject: Sensing, Suffering, and Responding 6. The Flesh Made Word; Or The Two Origins, by Bettina Bergo 7. Nietzsche, Levinas, and the Meaning of Responsibility, by Rosalyn Diprose 8. Beginning's Abyss: On Solitude in Nietzsche and Levinas, by John Drabinski 9. Beyond Suffering I Have No Alibi, by David Boothroyd 10. Levinas, Spinozism, Nietzsche, and the Body, by Richard A. Cohen Part III. Heteronomy and Ubiquity: God in Philosophy 11. Suffering Redeemable and Irredeemable, by John Llewelyn 12. Levinas's Gaia Scienza, by Aïcha Liviana Messina 13. Levinas: Another Ascetic Priest?, by Silvia Benso 14. Apocalypse, Eschatology, and the Death of God, by Brian Schroeder Bibliography List of Contributors Index