Lexington Books
Pages: 184
Trim: 6½ x 9
978-1-7936-5116-7 • Hardback • February 2022 • $95.00 • (£73.00)
978-1-7936-5117-4 • eBook • February 2022 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
Brian W. Becker is professor of neuropsychology at Lesley University and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Problem of the Problem of Evil
Part I: Modes of Givenness
Chapter 1: “They Shall Know Them by Their Fruits”: A Phenomenology of Givenness
Chapter 2: Parasitic Givenness
Part II: The Four Horsemen of the Thanatonic
Chapter 3: Lost Time: The Event of Trauma
Chapter 4: The Evil Eye
Chapter 5: “It is No Longer I Who Do it”: The Foreign-body
Chapter 6: “Surely it is Not I”: The Abject
Part III: Amputation of the Possible
Chapter 7: Being Diminished: The Thanatonic Ego
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Notes
About the Author
"Brian Becker's Thanatonic phenomenology is also a Thanatonic psychology; rarely have the two disciplines been so linked to each other. Regarding trauma, it is also phenomenology itself that must be transformed. The evil hurts in that it refers to the constitution of myself. To read Evil and Givenness is to cross what makes the deepest part of our humanity."
— Emmanuel Falque, Professor of Philosophy, Catholic Institute of Paris
"Developing clues drawn from throughout Jean-Luc Marion’s work, including both very early and very recent writings addressing the logic of evil, Brian Becker argues persuasively that we need to understand the transcendental ego of modernity phenomenologically within the horizon of givenness. Emerging subsequent to the gifted who accepts to receive itself by suffering the excessiveness of saturated phenomena, the traumatized “thanatonic” ego instead refuses to acknowledge its givenness, diminishing and misrecognizing itself to the point of feeding parasitically on the given, repeatedly inflicting its suffering on the objects it constructs. Becker demonstrates with admirable sensitivity and insight that the phenomenology of givenness can shed light on even the darkest phenomena of human experience."
— Stephen E. Lewis, Franciscan University of Steubenville