The Face of Things

Book excerpt: Here's a book that dispels the traditional tendency of philosophy to ignore the alterity of things. Drawing on two major figures in the continental tradition—Levinas and Heidegger—author Silvia Benso engages them on the provocative issue of an ethics of things. She argues that Levinas advances an ethics without things, and Heidegger proffers a conception of things without ethics. Taking up their respective meditations on ethics and things precisely at the point where they abandon such themes, and exposing them to each other, Benso innovatively elaborates an ethical attitude toward things capable of celebrating their alterity—a demand rendered urgent and compelling by the contemporary environmental crisis. Creatively centered on a philosophical hermeneutics of tenderness, The Face of Things advances the everyday time of festivity as the novel dimension within which the alterity of things can be recognized, preserved, and celebrated.