'Inappropriate Thoughts': On Visker's The Inhuman Condition

摘要

The otherwise disparate essays collected in Rudi Visker's The Inhuman Condition: Looking for Difference after Levinas and Heidegger gravitate around a problem that Visker takes to be characteristic of the post-modern age. The problem is not any specific philosophical disagreement, but the way that so many philosophical disagreements seem to end in a peculiar kind of stalemate. One might call this the problem of difference—that problem manifested when disputants are unable to resolve their disputes rationally because they lack any common currency for mediating the disagreement. The disagreement ends in a stalemate, because it reaches a point where neither side is able to muster evidence that the other side considers relevant or recognizes as dispositive of the issue. Sometimes the problem of difference is so pronounced that it stretches the limits of the term to even call the respective parties "disputants", to even conceive of them as locked in dispute.