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

Challenges the accepted model, and builds a politically sensitive notion of generosity.

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.