| Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe Contributor(s): Rubenstein, Mary-Jane (Author) |
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ISBN: 0231146329 ISBN-13: 9780231146326 Publisher: Columbia University Press OUR PRICE: $103.95 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: March 2009 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Religion | Philosophy - Philosophy | Movements - Deconstruction - Philosophy | History & Surveys - General |
| Dewey: 190 |
| LCCN: 2008032131 |
| Series: Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture |
| Physical Information: 1.1" H x 6.1" W x 9.1" (1.10 lbs) 272 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Strange Wonder confronts Western philosophy's ambivalent relationship to the Platonic "wonder" that reveals the strangeness of the everyday. On the one hand, this wonder is said to be the origin of all philosophy. On the other hand, it is associated with a kind of ignorance that ought to be extinguished as swiftly as possible. By endeavoring to resolve wonder's indeterminacy into certainty and calculability, philosophy paradoxically secures itself at the expense of its own condition of possibility. Strange Wonder locates a reopening of wonder's primordial uncertainty in the work of Martin Heidegger, for whom wonder is first experienced as the shock at the groundlessness of things and then as an astonishment that things nevertheless are. Mary-Jane Rubenstein traces this double movement through the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida, ultimately thematizing wonder as the awesome, awful opening that exposes thinking to devastation as well as transformation. Rubenstein's study shows that wonder reveals the extraordinary in and through the ordinary, and is therefore crucial to the task of reimagining political, religious, and ethical terrain. |
Contributor Bio(s): Rubenstein, Mary-Jane: - Mary-Jane Rubenstein is professor of religion; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; and science in society at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe(Columbia, 2009) and Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (Columbia, 2014) and the coeditor of Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms (with Catherine Keller, 2017). |