The Fragility of Concern for Others: Adorno and the Ethics of Care(Contemporary Continental Ethics)

Estelle Ferrarese is one of the leading figures of the contemporary French reception of Critical Theory and this book offers a renewal of the thinking of Theodor W. Adorno. Ferrarese develops our thinking about the social conditions of caring for others, while arguing for an understanding of morality that is materialist and political always-already political. Taking the social philosopher Theodor W. Adorno as a point of departure, she questions this social philosophy by submitting it to ideas deriving from theories of care. She thinks through the mechanisms of the social fragility of caring for others, the moral gesture it enjoins, as well as its political stakes. In the end, Ferrarese shows that the capitalist form of life, strained by a generalised indifference, produces a compartmentalised attention to others, one limited to very particular tasks and domains and attributed to women

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Confluences A Body-Centred Morality The Particular against the General What Is Moral Reasoning? Internal Nature, External Nature Gaps 2. The Empire of Coldness The Withering of Experience, Commensurability, Fetishism and Self-Preservation. Forgetting Others The Withering of Lived Experience Commensurability and Interchangeability Fantasmagoria and Fetishism Self-Preservation Reflections on the Thesis of ‘Forgetting’ Forgetting as a Political (not Cognitive) Category The Human Being, A Figure without Substrate 3. A Forgetting in the Thesis of Forgetting Adorno and ‘Woman’ The Gender Order: Adornian Insights and Blind Spots Cold, Furiously Cold Women Gendered Moral Dispositions: A Reading of Care Theories Coldness and Caring for Others after Late Capitalism The Temptation of ‘Emotional Capitalism’ Counter-Arguments 4. Concern for Others in a Wrong World The Fragility of Concern for Others in Acts The Impossibility of Moral Knowledge Disadjustments and Reversals Moral Powerlessness, Political Power The Moral ‘Wrongness’ of Concern? Bibliography

About the Author :
Estelle Ferrarese is Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at Picardie-Jules-Verne University, France. She is the author of Vulnerability and Critical Theory (Brill, 2018), Ethique et politique de l'espace public. Habermas et la discussion (Vrin, 2015) and Qu’est-ce que lutter pour la reconnaissance? (Editions Le Bord de l’Eau, 2013). She is co-editor of Formes de vie (editions du CNRS, 2018) and The Politics of Vulnerability (Routledge, 2017). She is also the author of numerous articles on the Frankfurt School, feminism, deliberative democracy and vulnerability as a political category. Steven Corcoran has translated numerous works by French and German philosophers, including Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, and is the editor of The Badiou Dictionary, published by Edinburgh University Press.