Rosalyn Diprose 
Corporeal Generosity 
On Giving with Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas

Rosalyn Diprose contends that generosity is not just a human virtue, but it is an openness to others that is critical to our existence, sociality, and social formation. Her theory challenges the accepted model of generosity as a common character trait that guides a person to give something they possess away to others within an exchange economy. This book places giving in the realm of ontology, as well as the area of politics and social production, as it promotes ways to foster social relations that generate sexual, cultural, and stylistic differences. The analyses in the book theorize generosity in terms of intercorporeal relations where the self is given to others. Drawing primarily on the philosophy of Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, and offering critical interpretations of feminist philosophers such as Beauvoir and Butler, the author builds a politically sensitive notion of generosity.

Table of Content

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Introducing Generosity

Part I. Giving Identity and Difference

1. Nietzsche and the Pathos of Distance

2. Giving Sexed Corporeality before the Law

3. Performing Body-Identity through the Other

Part II. Generosity and the Politics of Affectivity

4. Erotic Generosity and Its Limits

5. Affectivity and Social Power: From Melancholia to Generosity

6. Sexuality and the Clinical Encounter

Part III. Generosity and Community (Trans)Formation

7. Thinking through Radical Generosity with Levinas

8. Truth, Cultural Difference, and Decolonization

9. Generosity, Community, and Politics

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the author

Rosalyn Diprose is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She is the author of
The Bodies of Women: Ethics, Embodiment and Sexual Difference.