Philosophy Across Borders

This book brings into conversation geographically diverse theorists to question the meaning, purpose, and place of conceptual borders in philosophy. It shows how contemporary theory is constituted by a dynamic practice in which the boundaries created to define it are simultaneously overcome in their establishment. Philosophy has often taken itself to be distinguished from and superior to alternative ways of thinking. To do so, philosophical thinking has found itself rigidly affirming the need to think within borders to obtain conceptual clarity and certainty and/or secure its own independent existence. The chapters in this volume call into question the need to retreat behind demarcated boundaries that mark the domain of philosophy proper, to instead offer a performative account of how philosophy can creatively work across (geographical, cultural, linguistic) borders, without foreclosing that analysis conceptually. In so doing, the contributors tackle issues including the historical establishment of philosophical borders, the metaphysics of philosophical borders, the relationship between Western and non-Western thinking, the ethics of transgressing borders, and the political implications of Western rationality on and for non-Western societies. Philosophy Across Borders will therefore be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy, aesthetics, critical theory, comparative philosophy, cultural studies, feminist theory, history of ideas, political theory, and postcolonial studies. Cover Half Title Series Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Philosophy Across Borders Part I Critique 1 Beyond Hope: The Borders Between Theoretical and Practical Philosophy 2 The Metaphysics Beneath a Limit: Criticism From Con-temporary Liminal Theory 3 Philosophy without Borders, or the Permanence of Questioning Part II Crossing Cultures 4 Thinking “Orientally”: Nietzsche and Indian Philosophy 5 Adorno and the Work of the Spirit: Modernism in Aesthetic Terms Part III Ethics 6 Against the Intolerable: On Limits, Boundaries, and Transgression 7 Foucault, Feminism, and the Limits of Experience 8 Where Are We When We Think From Within the Body? Part IV Politics 9 No Accounting for Taste: Aesthesis on the Borders of Philosophy 10 Crossing Lines Between Deleuze and Négritude: A Vitalist Ontology of Post-Colonial War Machines Notes on Contributors Index