Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays, edited by H.Maes and J.Levinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 344 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-960958-1 hb £35 (original) (raw)

2014, European Journal of Philosophy

through our flesh, that makes us desire revenge not only for ourselves but also on behalf of others who have suffered; the more involved we feel with the bodies of others, the more we feel the atrocities committed against them as unsettling our own embodied selves. The 'dream of purity' has to be abandoned, again, with respect to the question of revenge and its presence in political judgments, since the other is never a neutral other, a disembodied, abstract consciousness, but rather a concrete other who rises within us embodied responses of hate or of desire. There are no easy answers, so it seems, to our questions regarding the principles which need to inform 'right political actions'; we are doomed to failure, since 'failure is a condition of life itself' (p. 181). Nevertheless, Kruks appropriately concludes her multifaceted book on a rather optimistic note, for Beauvoir's humanist philosophy calls not for despair but for an amplification of freedom in the world, even when the price of such an amplification is complexity and a lack of clear solutions. This must not discourage us, since ambiguity, even more than failure, is a condition of life itself, and Kruks does a compelling job in this book of convincing us that ambiguity is just the right place to live in.