Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures University of Toronto
We are pleased to announce the publication of a new book by Professor Willi Goetschel, Difference and Alterity in La Boétie, Montaigne, Spinoza and Mendelssohn.
This study redirects our attention to a group of thinkers whose project of rethinking difference and alterity assumes new critical significance at the current juncture. Spanning from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the interventions of La Boétie, Montaigne, Spinoza and Mendelssohn are not just history, albeit one problematically assimilated to canonical views, but offer new resources for moving past the politics of tolerance, charity, and recognition. Rather, these thinkers argue for an understanding of otherness that renegotiates the terms of difference and alterity more radically as the conditions of our own existence. From La Boétie’s exposure of ‘voluntary servitude’ as the mechanism behind the tyranny of despotic authority that ultimately rests on a pyramid scheme of dependency sustained solely by the agreement of those who willingly submit, to Montaigne, Spinoza, and Mendelssohn, these thinkers argue for the critical importance of the deep constitutive nexus between self and other, identity, difference, and otherness.
Published by Edinburgh University Press, the book is now available. Visit this site for more information.
