Slow Philosophy

Michelle Boulous Walker is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Queensland, Australia.

• AcknowledgementsPreface: Why Slow Reading Today?Posing the Question: what is it to read?About the ChaptersIntroduction: On Being Slow and Doing PhilosophyThe Love of Wisdom and the Desire to KnowThe Play Between the Instituting and the Instituted in PhilosophyPhilosophy as a Way of Life: Slow Reading – Slow PhilosophyResisting Institutional Reading1 Habits of Reading: Le Dœuff’s Future PhilosophyPhilosophy as DisciplinePhilosophy’s Old Habits of ReadingHow Men and Women ReadTeaching Reading: Sadism, Collaboration?Le Dœuff’s Habits of ReadingA Philosophy Still to Come: Open-ended WorkHabits of Slow Reading2 Reading Essayistically: Levinas and Adorno Emmanuel Levinas: An Ethics of Reading?Institution and Instrumental ReasonTheodor W. Adorno: The Essay as FormLuiz Costa Lima: Criticity and the EssayHans Ulrich Gumbrecht: Reading for “Stimmung”Robert Musil: Essay, Ethics, Aesthetics3 Re-reading: Irigaray on Love and Wonder Psychoanalysis, Listening, AttentionIrigaray’s Diotima: The Arts of Philosophy, Reading, and LoveDescartes’s “Passions of the Soul”: Irigaray’s Wondrous ReadingLove and Wonder: Reading4 The Present of Reading: Irigaray’s Attentive ListeningThe Nobility of Sight: Hans JonasListening-to: Luce Irigaray’s Way of LoveThe Present of Reading: Friedrich Nietzsche and Others5 Romance and Authenticity: Beauvoir’s Lesson in ReadingRomantic and Authentic LoveReading and LoveAuthenticity as Ethics?Returning to Beauvoir: How does she read?Le Dœuff’s Reading of Beauvoir’s Reading of Sartre: “Operative Philosophy”Rethinking “Operative Philosophy” with the help of Beauvoir’s Own Categories of Romance and AuthenticityBeauvoir Reading the Couple: “Sartre and Beauvoir”6 Intimate Reading: Cixous’s ApproachA Desire resonant with LoveCixous Writing: “Entredeux”Writing as Gift and GenerosityGenerosity, Love, AbandonCixous Reading: Intimacy, GivingThe Approach: A slow passage between the self and the strangeness of the otherCixous and Irigaray: extreme proximity?The Gifts of Abandon and Grace: An ethics of readingConclusion: The Attentive Work of GraceSimone Weil: attention to gravity and graceMartin Heidegger: rapture (Rausch) and meditative thinkingReading as an Aesthetic ExperienceHans Ulrich Gumbrecht: reading for intensityNotesBibliography

The real innovation of Boulous Walker’s book is its understanding of philosophia — the love of wisdom — in terms of the love of reading. The point is not that philosophers do not read, or that they ought to read more, but that philosophy needs to rethink what it is to read, and to think carefully about what it is to read better. Hence the importance of slowness.