Duquesne University Press

The Inhuman Condition

Looking for Difference after Levinas and Heidegger

By Rudi Visker

Published in 2008
$24.95  paper
Text discount available
ISBN: 978-0-8207-0417-3

320 pages

Add to Order

Book Information

At its core, this volume seeks to address a simple question: how should we understand the surprisingly monotonous statements of our societies and our philosophers that all converge around the theme of the importance of difference?

In this postmodern age, Visker points out, many philosophical disagreements end in a strange sort of stalemate, as parties are unable to resolve their disputes because they lack common ground for mediating the disagreement. Opposing sides, indeed, may have so little in common that they cannot even be said to disagree, but are said to be characterized by difference. Our lives are influenced more and more by such differences, as we witness culture wars in ideological, political, and even armed forms.

In The Inhuman Condition, Rudi Visker provides a literate discussion of the limitations of various philosophical antecedents for understanding and dealing with the problem of difference. To clarify the meaning of the difference at stake here, Visker rephrases the issue in terms of the two major and mutually competing paradigms provided by the history of phenomenology-the ethical and the ontological- only to find both of them equally unable to accommodate this difference without violence. Neither approach can account for a subject that insists on playing a part of its own rather than following the script provided for it by either Being or the Good.

Discussions of Heidegger’s and Levinas’s views of difference lead Visker to an alternate approach that is neither ontological nor ethical, but “mè-ontological,” to help us to understand our societal problems. Finally, this book asks, how do we see the “human condition” once we realize that there is an “inhuman” side to it that, rather than being its mere negation, turns out to be that without which the human condition would lose its humanity?

Author Information

RUDI VISKER is professor of contemporary continental philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. He is the author of Michel Foucault: Genealogy as Critique and Truth and Singularity: Taking Foucault into Phenomenology. He is also on the editorial board of Levinas Studies and is the editor of the leading Dutch philosophy journal, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie.

Book Reviews

“Visker, more doggedly than any other author I know, sets about grappling with the consequences of such a [postmodern] view of subjectivity. If our differences are not amenable to rational mediation, because they are not available to rational reflection, then this has important consequences for political efforts to deal with multiculturalism. . . . And it has important consequences for the way we think of ethics, for the other that we stand ethically bound to respect is not a bare rational ego. . . . Anyone concerned with such issues would do well to grapple with The Inhuman Condition.” - Inquiry