Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2004 01:48:02 -0800 (PST)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] Review of "Against Autonomy" by Neil Curtis


This book appears to oppose Levinasian ethics to
Kantian autonomy in a way that would be relevant to
anarchists, at least according to the short review...

*** 

Curtis, Neal. (2001). Against Autonomy. Lyotard,
Judgement and Action. Series: Ashgate New Critical
Thinking in Philosophy. ISBN: 0 7546 1307 0, /2001,
274 pages, Hardback, 219 x 153 mm 

"Curtis addresses important questions relating to
dilemmas arising in the wake of the philosophical
critiques of the foundational discourses of modernity.
His reappraisal of Lyotard, with its implications for
a post-modern politics, is an important contribution
to the new corpus of work emerging on Lyotard." Couze
Venn, The Nottingham Trent University, UK. Against
Autonomy reassesses Jean-Francois Lyotard's
contribution to philosophy and theory, and explores
how his work challenges the privileged position of the
principle of autonomy in contemporary liberal
democratic thinking, as seen in such diverse thinkers
as Rawls, Rorty and Fukuyama. Curtis argues that the
political models autonomy legitimates are inadequate
for thinking justice. Such models invariably promote
self-legislation as the ground of freedom turning the
subject away from its prior constitution by, and
responsibility for, the Other. He explores Lyotard's
reading of Kant as well as his responses to Levinas
and Heidegger in order to rethink the political.
Developing a regulative Idea based on new
understandings of heteronomy and an-archy Curtis shows
how Lyotard's argument that there are no criteria for
justice does not mean judgement and action fall prey
to decisionism and relativism, but that this lack of
criteria commits us to a renewed sensitivity to
events. 

Examining Lyotard's work in relation to Arendt's
writings on the vita activa, this book explores themes
of community, communication and action, suggesting how
Lyotard's work calls for an alternative conception of
political space. This book will be of particular
interest to those studying communitarianism,
liberalism, anarchism, post-structuralism and
postmodernism, particularly within the context of
political philosophy, ethics, and political and social
theory. 


===="Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the 
        mania
     Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and
         one way."

- Friedrich Hölderlin, 1799

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