Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Janklvitch: On What Cannot Be Touched

(Hardback)

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Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Janklvitch: On What Cannot Be Touched performs a cross-disciplinary theoretical analysis of the philosophy of Vladimir Janklvitch. An international group of contributors, including both established and emerging scholars, engage with his writings from diverse disciplinary angles and consider his importance for contemporary political and cultural contexts. Edited by Marguerite La Caze and Magdalena Zolkos, the collection provides a holistic and multi-perspectival approach to Janklvitchs writings, one that illuminates nuanced and complex connections across the five sub-fields of philosophy to which Janklvitch contributed: moral philosophy, virtue theory, metaphysics, philosophy of music, and philosophy of religion. The book addresses different aspects of and problems in Janklvitchs philosophy, with all chapters unified by a preoccupation with the motif of intangibilitythat which cannot be touched.

Reviews

This timely volume provides the best and most expansive investigation of Vladimir Janklvitchs thought available in English. He was an author who always felt that he would be born posthumously. This book goes a long way to making that prediction a reality. -- Alexandre Lefebvre, University of Sydney
This work masterfully treats many of Janklvitchs important concepts and arguments, including the possibility of forgiveness, remorse, love, humility, virtue, the almost-nothing, and the je-ne-sais-quoi. The work carried out in this volume will pave the way for further study and engaged discussion of Janklvitchs timely, singular, and creative philosophy. -- Antonio Calcagno, King's University College at Western University
A necessary and challenging work, La Caze and Zolkos collection renews attention not only on Janklvitch as a key French philosopher who wrote `for the twenty-first century, but also on Frances subsequent `moral development after the Holocaust. The essays move beyond their philosophical foci to suggest that the political and ethical elements of Janklvitchs thought in relation to modernity, fraught as it is with the reemergence of fascism, race hatred, and Anti-Semitism, are intimately tied to conclusions Janklvitch drew from his Holocaust experience. La Caze and Zolkos present Janklvitchs work as a case study on how to shift the valence of `forgiveness to account for the `homelessness of the Jewish philosopher, on how to link the philosophical to the ethical. -- Kitty Millet, San Francisco State University
A beloved professor at the Sorbonne, well-known in the musical and intellectual circles of his time, Vladimir Janklvitch nonetheless felt himself to be an outsider to twentieth-century French philosophy. This collection makes the case that he is uniquely a philosopher for our times. With important essays that span the wide range of Janklvitchs writings on remorse, forgiveness, love, death, music, metaphysics, and ethics, this volume will reward readers new to his philosophy and sharpen our sense of the philosophical and artistic legacy of a truly original thinker. -- Diane Perpich, Clemson University

Author Bio

Marguerite La Caze is associate professor in philosophy at the University of Queensland. Magdalena Zolkos is Humboldt Research Fellow at Goethe University in Frankfurt.