Fragility of Concern for Others

Estelle Ferrarese is Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at Picardie-Jules-Verne University. She is a Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France.She has been Visiting Professor at the New School for Social Research in New York and Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation fellow at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin. Her books include Une philosophie des sanglots (Rivages, 2025), The Fragility of Concern for Others. Adorno and the Ethics of Care (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Vulnerability and Critical Theory (Brill, 2018), Ethique et politique de l'espace public. Habermas et la discussion, (Vrin, 2015).Steven Corcoran is the editor of The Badiou Dictionary and translator of Dissensus by Jacques Rancière, and the Secretary of Parrhesia, School of Philosophy, Berlin.

• Introduction1. Confluences A Body-Centred Morality The Particular against the General What Is Moral Reasoning? Internal Nature, External NatureGaps 2. The Empire of Coldness The Withering of Experience, Commensurability, Fetishism and Self-Preservation. Forgetting OthersThe 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 ForgettingAdorno and ‘Woman’The Gender Order: Adornian Insights and Blind Spots Cold, Furiously Cold WomenGendered 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 ActsThe Impossibility of Moral Knowledge Disadjustments and Reversals Moral Powerlessness, Political Power The Moral ‘Wrongness’ of Concern? Bibliography