Ethics, Contemporaneity, and Deconstruction: The Philosophical Criticism of Violence

   CONTENTS  

Levinas, Adorno, and Derrida reunited

To reunite Emmanuel Levinas, Theodor Adorno, and Jacques Derrida is considered to be an improbable task by many scholars. Nevertheless, the Research Group on Ethics, Contemporaneity, and Deconstruction: The Philosophical Criticism of Violence met the challenge and succeeded in intertwining the thoughts of these three authors in the field of ethics. In a highly singular manner, references to these three icons contributed to the grounding of master’s and doctoral dissertations on the philosophical criticism of bio-political violence.

According to the group’s chair, Professor Ricardo Timm de Souza, the reunion of philosophers representing different schools is a thoroughly innovative approach to the investigated subject and allows interfaces with other schools and lines of philosophical and literary thought, such as Rosenzweig, Bloch, Benjamin, Bergson, and Kafka. The following three lines of research were developed by this group: the study of Levinas’, Adorno’s, and Derrida’s thoughts from a strictly philosophical perspective; a thorough investigation of the features related to the Ethics of Alterity, Negative Dialectics, and Deconstruction in their relationship to other features of contemporary culture and science, particularly in the fields of law, psychoanalysis, and literature; and the development of interfaces between the Ethics of Alterity, Negative Dialectics, and Derrida’s Deconstruction and contemporary esthetics.

The cross-sectional nature of the central subject attracts master’s and doctoral students from the fields of philosophy, law, literature, psychology, psychoanalysis, theology, and medicine. This group, which comprises members from approximately 10 universities across Brazil, represents the confluence of various previous groups and has consolidated within the last 10 years. The group’s current production includes approximately 20 master’s and 8 doctoral dissertations, countless articles and chapters in books, and approximately 30 individual and collective books, e.g., Alterity and Ethics (Edipucrs, 2008) edited by André Brayner de Farias (UCS/PUCRS), Marcelo Fabri (UFSM), and Ricardo Timm de Souza (PUCRS).