This book sets up a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address contemporary environmental and social-political situations. Eric S. Nelson explores the "non-identity thinking" of Adorno and the "ethics of the Other" of Levinas with regard to three areas of concern: the ethical position of nature and "inhuman" material others such as environments and animals; the bonds and tensions between ethics and religion and the formation of the self through the dynamic of violence and liberation expressed in religious discourses; and the problematic uses and limitations of liberal and republican discourses of equality, liberty, tolerance, and their presupposition of the private individual self and autonomous subject. Thinking with and beyond Levinas and Adorno, this work examines the possibility of an anarchic hospitality and solidarity between material others and sensuous embodied life.

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: On the Way to an Ethics of Material OthersPart I: After Nature: Ethics, Natural History, and Environmental Crisis1. Toward a Critical Ecological Model of Natural History2. Natural History, Nonidentity, and Ecological Crisis3. Communicative Interaction or Natural History? Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature 4. The Trouble with Life: Life-Philosophy, Antinaturalism, and Transcendence in Levinas5. An Ethics of Nature at the End of NaturePart II: Unsettling Religion: Suffering, Prophecy, and the Good6. Religion, Suffering, and Damaged Life: Nietzsche, Marx, and Adorno7. The Disturbance of the Ethical: Kierkegaard, Levinas, and Abraham's Binding of Isaac8. Ethics between Religiosity and Secularity: Kierkegaard and Levinas9. Prophetic Time, Materiality, and Dignity: Bloch and Levinas10. Ethical Imperfectionism and the Sovereignty of Good: Levinas, Løgstrup, and MurdochPart III: Demanding Justice: Asymmetrical Ethics and Critical Social Theory11. Equality, Justice, and Asymmetrical Ethics12. The Pathologies of Freedom and the Promise of Autonomy13. The Limits of Liberalism: Cosmopolitanism, Tolerance, and Asymmetrical Ethics14. Recognition, Nonidentity, and the Contradictions of LiberalismEpilogue: Nourishing Life, Unrestricted Solidarity, and the GoodNotesBibliographyIndex