Skip to main content

A gift

Not read my PHILOSOPHY FOR LIFE yet? Check out this review, by Marko Zlomislic, which may persuade you to do so:
There are lots of things in Zlomislic's perceptive review with which I agree, and lots of things which I would take issue with. But I take most of these latter to be 'Yes, and..' rather than 'Yes, but..' criticisms. In other words, they are things that I would have gone into myself, had my book been twice as long. I accentuated the positive vis a vis Chomsky and Tolkien, for instance - as Zlomislic does, I could easily have accentuated the negative too (and I have done, elsewhere in my writing, vis a vis Chomsky). I am happy to let the reader judge for themselves which of Zlomislic's points of disagreement with me may point to a genuine problem with what I am saying in the book.
One exception, one thing that Zlomislic says that I will take issue with here: While I have also written much more about Derrida and about forgiveness elsewhere, too, I specifically disagree with Zlomislic's praise of Derrida on forgiveness. Derrida has written brilliantly about 'the gift', but his writings on 'the forgift' are not up to scratch. To argue that forgiveness is a gift that one gives to oneself, is, as I have argued, in the end to fail to present the reader with a discussion of forgiveness at all. For forgiveness, if it is to be forgiveness, must be once more a gift that one gives to the other, not merely to oneself. (And that is what makes its status mysterious, and its achievement paradoxical, extraordinary.)
Let me know what you think of my book, and / or of Zlomislic's reivew. And: If you really like the book, why not buy it and give it to a friend?!...
 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

More on why 20's plenty -- without need for any further 'trials'...

There are a number of reasons for setting a default speed of 20mph throughout the 'unclassified' road network in residential parts of a city such as Norwich. Most important perhaps is that of driver recognition as to what the speed limit is. If you have 20 mph as the default then you not only establish this limit clearly, but you also adjust the driver's recognition as to what is the "normal" speed in such residential areas. The most important aspect is that drivers set 20 mph as the norm with those 30 mph areas or roads being seen as 50% faster, rather than seeing 30 mph as the norm with 20 mph as 33% slower. The psychological adjustment of normal speeds in residential areas is key to the success of reducing speeds and therefore danger to pedestrians and cyclists. Therefore any trial, pilot or whatever, that only implements 20 mph in a tiny proportion of the city is not modelling 20's Plenty in any realistic manner.   When considering the val...

Stansted: a reflection

The key question, in relation to protsts like that at Stansted last week, is: which side are you on? Are you on the side of big corporations profiteering from completely unsustainable climate-destructive behaviour? Or are you on the side of people with no vested interests just making a non-violent stand, at considerable cost to their own time and money, for the sake of all our futures? It doesn't seem to me a hard judgement to make... Rupert Read Green Party Councillor, Norwich, and Lead Candidate for Eastern Region for the Greens in the 2009 Euro-elections. DID YOU KNOW: A vote of about 10% across Eastern Region on June 4 2009 would be enough to get me elected to the European Parliament... http://rupertsread.blogspot.com