The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience

Adapting hints taken from Derrida, this book works toward a construal of neighbourhood and direct ecological responsibility through crossed readings of Levinas's teaching of the Other and Heidegger's thinking of the "fourfold" and letting-be. After a chapter introducing Levinas's metaphysics of the face by imagining the diagnosis he would give of the spiritual crisis of John Stuart Mill, in chapters on what Heidegger writes about Kant's phenomenology of respect, on Heidegger's comments regarding Holderlin, Rilke and Trakl and on Levinas's comments regarding femininity, art and a remark by Celan, it is argued that conscience interpreted via the grammatical notion of middle voice announces a direct asymmetrical responsibility toward needy existents as such, whether they be rational or sentient or living or not.