Radical Passivity

Download or read book Radical Passivity written by Thomas Carl Wall and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1999-01-28 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Radical Passivity examines the notion of passivity in the work of Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben, three thinkers of exceptional intellectual privacy whose writings have decidedly altered the literary and philosophical cultures of our era. Placing their use of passivity in the context of Heidegger and Kant, Wall argues that any philosophical understanding of Levinas's ethics, Blanchot's aesthetics, or Agamben's community must begin with an understanding of a "logic" of passivity that in fact originates (in the modern era at least) in Kant's analysis of the transcendental schema.