Fragility of Concern for Others

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.

• 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