Slow Philosophy

Michelle Boulous Walker is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Queensland, Australia.

Acknowledgements

Preface: Why Slow Reading Today?
Posing the Question: what is it to read?
About the Chapters

Introduction: On Being Slow and Doing Philosophy
The Love of Wisdom and the Desire to Know
The Play Between the Instituting and the Instituted in Philosophy
Philosophy as a Way of Life: Slow Reading – Slow Philosophy
Resisting Institutional Reading

1 Habits of Reading: Le Dœuff’s Future Philosophy
Philosophy as Discipline
Philosophy’s Old Habits of Reading
How Men and Women Read
Teaching Reading: Sadism, Collaboration?
Le Dœuff’s Habits of Reading
A Philosophy Still to Come: Open-ended Work
Habits of Slow Reading

2 Reading Essayistically: Levinas and Adorno
Emmanuel Levinas: An Ethics of Reading?
Institution and Instrumental Reason
Theodor W. Adorno: The Essay as Form
Luiz Costa Lima: Criticity and the Essay
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: Reading for “Stimmung”
Robert Musil: Essay, Ethics, Aesthetics

3 Re-reading: Irigaray on Love and Wonder
Psychoanalysis, Listening, Attention
Irigaray’s Diotima: The Arts of Philosophy, Reading, and Love
Descartes’s “Passions of the Soul”: Irigaray’s Wondrous Reading
Love and Wonder: Reading

4 The Present of Reading: Irigaray’s Attentive Listening
The Nobility of Sight: Hans Jonas
Listening-to: Luce Irigaray’s Way of Love
The Present of Reading: Friedrich Nietzsche and Others

5 Romance and Authenticity: Beauvoir’s Lesson in Reading
Romantic and Authentic Love
Reading and Love
Authenticity as Ethics?
Returning to Beauvoir: How does she read?
Le Dœuff’s Reading of Beauvoir’s Reading of Sartre: “Operative Philosophy”
Rethinking “Operative Philosophy” with the help of Beauvoir’s Own Categories of
Romance and Authenticity
Beauvoir Reading the Couple: “Sartre and Beauvoir”

6 Intimate Reading: Cixous’s Approach
A Desire resonant with Love
Cixous Writing: “Entredeux”
Writing as Gift and Generosity
Generosity, Love, Abandon
Cixous Reading: Intimacy, Giving
The Approach: A slow passage between the self and the strangeness of the other
Cixous and Irigaray: extreme proximity?
The Gifts of Abandon and Grace: An ethics of reading

Conclusion: The Attentive Work of Grace
Simone Weil: attention to gravity and grace
Martin Heidegger: rapture (Rausch) and meditative thinking
Reading as an Aesthetic Experience
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: reading for intensity

Notes
Bibliography