Difference and Alterity in La Boétie, Montaigne, Spinoza and Mendelssohn - (Cycles) by Willi Goetschel (Hardcover)

About the Book

Traces a shared critical agenda highlighting the emancipatory force of difference and otherness.

Book Synopsis

This book redirects our attention to a group of thinkers whose project of rethinking difference and alterity assumes new critical significance at the current juncture. Reaching from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the interventions of La Boétie, Montaigne, Spinoza and Mendelssohn are not just history (albeit one problematically assimilated to canonical views), but offer new resources for moving past the politics of tolerance, charity, and recognition.

These thinkers argue for an understanding of otherness that renegotiates the terms of difference and alterity more radically as the conditions of our own existence. From La Boétie's exposure of 'voluntary servitude' as the mechanism behind the tyranny of despotic authority, to the ideas of Montaigne, Spinoza and Mendelssohn, these thinkers argue for the critical importance of the deep constitutive nexus between self and other: identity, difference and otherness.

Review Quotes

In this engagingly written and deeply erudite study, Goetschel stages a compelling conversation between Boétie, Montaigne, Spinoza, and Mendelssohn on difference and alterity. Through his impressively skilful tracking of the movement of the liberatory and constructive potentialities of alterity and difference in their writings, Goetschel reveals the power of this constellation of thinkers to profoundly reframe contemporary thought.--Moira Gatens, Professor Emerita of Philosophy, University of Sydney

This book is a humane, erudite, and philosophically sophisticated attempt to bring back to life a strand of early modern intellectual history, starting with La Boëtie and extending to Moses Mendelssohn, which construed freedom as based on an acceptance of alterity. The contemporary relevance of this project is obvious.--Raymond Geuss, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Cambridge

Willi Goetschel's central claim, that familiar texts can be reconsidered and less familiar texts can be seen in a new constellation, leads to a compelling case for seeing human difference and alterity as central issues in a period marked by colonial projects, religious conflicts, and complex cultural exchanges. Goetschel examines a history of resistant texts that deserve renewed scrutiny.--Julie R. Klein, Villanova University