Corporeal Generosity: On Giving With Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas (Suny Series in Gender Theory)
Rosalyn Diprose
Language: English
Pages: 236
ISBN: 0791453227
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Rosalyn Diprose contends that generosity is not just a human virtue, but it is an openness to others that is critical to our existence, sociality, and social formation. Her theory challenges the accepted model of generosity as a common character trait that guides a person to give something they possess away to others within an exchange economy. This book places giving in the realm of ontology, as well as the area of politics and social production, as it promotes ways to foster social relations that generate sexual, cultural, and stylistic differences. The analyses in the book theorize generosity in terms of intercorporeal relations where the self is given to others. Drawing primarily on the philosophy of Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, and offering critical interpretations of feminist philosophers such as Beauvoir and Butler, the author builds a politically sensitive notion of generosity.
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labor) rather than part of the personal substance of the worker. Hence, under a service contract, I can receive payment for the service (rather than for part of my personhood), and I do not incur any personal loss in the transaction. Or so the story goes. On the basis of this model of contract, it is possible to sell my blood in some democracies and my organs in others. But not all bodies or body products are given the same moral weight within this schema. While there has been a lucrative and
way we think and act without us even noticing, and with Freud, and to a lesser extent Foucault, we can account for those affective moments when we seem to lose ourselves completely. But it seems to me that I am hardly ever together enough in the first place to bring off Foucault’s docility, the not noticing that is the product of a power that individualizes as it regulates. And I am hardly ever together enough to run Freud’s object-cathexis, the dissolving of borders that would reduce me to a
give this doctor the benefit of the doubt by suggesting that she is one of the new generation taught, at our request, to treat, not just the symptom but the patient as a whole person. Perhaps in her world, facial hair on a woman is a problem, a source of anxiety about sexuality and sexual difference. Not in Claudia’s world. She has lived with her hair forever; she likes it, as does her partner and friends; it is inseparable from her body given to a world, it is inseparable from her use of
organization of society for the improvement of human survival proceeds through the constitution of subjectivities by social ideas and images about bodies and their interrelation. The political is ontological. But how are we to understand this process of constitution by the sociopolitical realm, and so how far does the political extend, where does the political take place? While Levinas tends to restrict politics to the realm of conscious judgment and knowledge, Merleau-Ponty’s ontology would
generosity I write about, but squarely within my own profession. (But already, in saying that if I had achieved these objectives my response would be generous, I have failed, as I have, no doubt, throughout this book in responding to other’s writings on the body.) At the same time, the content of what I was asked to respond to provided the opportunity to suggest that the matter Keane and Rosengarten write about (called, variously, blood, hormones, tissue grafts, neurotransmitters, etc.) is itself
