Jeffrey McCurry

The Ethics of Immediacy (eBook, PDF)

Dangerous Experience in Freud, Woolf, and Merleau-Ponty

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

Drawing connections between Freudian psychoanalysis, Virginia Woolf's criticism and fiction, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, The Ethics of Immediacy recounts the far-reaching consequences of the modern turn towards a new ethics of immediacy.

During the first half of the 20th century, a profound transformation - an existential revolution - took place in European culture in how human beings conceived of themselves. Inspired by Freud's psychoanalysis, a newfound appreciation for the realm of immediate experience in human life emerged. With Freud himself making a signal contribution to this existential revolution, and with Woolf and Merleau-Ponty taking up Freud's ideas in their own unique ways, all three figures began to regard first-order, spontaneous, direct, unselfconscious, concrete experience of self and world as standing at the heart of what it means to be human.

Jeffrey McCurry describes how this new state of affairs stood in contrast to how immediate experience had been historically dismissed, devalued, repressed, and even negated in the fields of psychology, literature, and philosophy. This experience posed dangers to psychological stability, social order, and philosophical certainty. McCurry examines how Freud's psychoanalytic theory, Woolf's modernist criticism and fiction, and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, psychology, literature, and philosophy in turns embraced the risks and dangers of putting immediate experience as the center of humanity, of respecting, understanding, appreciating, and following the lead of immediate, spontaneous, pre-reflective, pre-evaluative, concrete experience in human life.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
• Seitenzahl: 224
• Erscheinungstermin: 5. Oktober 2023
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9798765107218
• Artikelnr.: 68535036

Autorenporträt

Jeffrey McCurry is Director of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center and affiliated faculty in the Department of Philosophy at Duquesne University, USA. Educated at Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, and the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center, his research centers on the intersection of philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis, and he has published on Augustine, Freud, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, and Derrida. He is also a member of faculty in the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center.