Critical Distance: Ethical and Literary Engagements with Detachment, Isolation, and Otherness

This book argues that no ethically appropriate relation to  other human beings is possible unless we treat them as genuinely other.  The authors provide reasons to be critical of various attempts, many of  them popular in our contemporary (Western) culture, to encourage deeper  attachment to and immersion into others’ lives and experiences. They  defend the significance of the distance between human beings,  criticizing exaggerated uses of, e.g., the concept of empathy and  related concepts in academic as well as more popular ethical contexts,  across a range of issues from the nature of ethical duty to the  philosophy of love. 

The chapters offer  non-technical philosophical and cultural criticism through selected  perspectives on the continuum between closeness and distance, exploring  various aspects of ethically significant relations between human beings.  This book thus appeals to a wide audience, especially researchers and  students in different fields of the humanities, including philosophy,  literary studies, and cultural studies, by combining philosophical and  literary methodologies in a humanistic examination of the value of  distance. The book also argues that we have to be able to abstract from  the concrete other in ethical relations, living in the normative and  rational sphere of duty instead of emotional immersion.