Throwing the Moral Dice: Ethics and the Problem of Contingency

More than a purely philosophical problem, straddling the ambivalent terrain between necessity and impossibility, contingency has become the very horizon of everyday life. Often used as a synonym for the precariousness of working conditions under neoliberalism, for the unknown threats posed by terrorism, or for the uncertain future of the planet itself, contingency needs to be calculated and controlled in the name of the protection of life.

The overcoming of contingency is not only called upon to justify questionable mechanisms of political control; it serves as a central legitimating factor for Enlightenment itself. In this volume, nine major philosophers and theorists address a range of questions around contingency and moral philosophy. How can we rethink contingency in its creative aspects, outside the dominant rhetoric of risk and dangerous exposure? What is the status of contingency--as the unnecessary and law-defying--in or for ethics? What would an alternative "ethics of contingency"--one that does not simply attempt to sublate it out of existence--look like?

The volume tackles the problem contingency has always posed to both ethical theory and dialectics: that of difference itself, in the difficult mediation between the particular and the universal, same and other, the contingent singularity of the event and the necessary generality of the norms and laws.

From deconstruction to feminism to ecological thought, some of today's most influential thinkers reshape many of the most debated concepts in moral philosophy: difference, agency, community, and life itself.

Contributors: Étienne Balibar, Rosi Braidotti, Thomas Claviez, Drucilla Cornell, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Viola Marchi, Michael Naas, Cary Wolfe, Slavoj Zizek

Author: Thomas Claviez
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 12/07/2021
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.96lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.67d
ISBN: 9780823298082

About the Author
Thomas Claviez (Edited By)
Thomas Claviez is Professor of Literary Theory at the University of Bern. He is the author of Aesthetics & Ethics: Otherness and Moral Imagination from Aristotle to Levinas and from 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' to 'House Made of Dawn.'

Viola Marchi (Edited By)
Viola Marchi is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern.

Alain Badiou (Foreword By)
Alain Badiou teaches philosophy at the École normale supérieure and the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. He is the author, most recently, of The Pornographic Age.