The review, by Keith Ansell Pearson, is here. Raffoul's academia.edu page is here. The Indiana University Press page for the book is here. Opening and closing paragraphs of the NDPR review:
In this book François Raffoul seeks to undertake a major reconsideration of the concept of responsibility, drawing upon the rich resources offered by trajectories in continental thought, notably Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida. His fundamental contention is that we need to think responsibility less in terms of denoting a sphere of power and control, revolving around the establishment of a sovereign subject, and more in terms of our exposure to an event that does not emanate from us but which does call us. According to Raffoul we need to think responsibility not in terms of a spontaneous initiation but rather as a response. This suggests to him that the phenomenological senses of responsibility are closer to a problematic of answerability than to one of accountability and the latter's dependence on a 'metaphysical' conception of the subject. As such, the argument represents what is now a familiar set of moves within continental philosophy, namely, dethroning the imperial claims of a philosophy of the subject and replacing this with a thinking of the event. However, the chief danger of such a move is that it runs the risk of instituting a new set of oppositions -- for example, between activity and passivity, between control and letting be, etc. -- and becomes blind to those situations where sovereign subjects might be needed in order to assume power and exercise control. I am not convinced that sovereignty can be so easily dispensed with, and in some cases in this study, Nietzsche for example (the philosopher of will to power!), the argument seems far-fetched and over-determined.
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Having made these criticisms let me conclude by giving the book a strong recommendation. Raffoul displays throughout considerable skills of reading and exegesis, and he has an important story to tell about the history of responsibility. It will be of tremendous interest to anyone working in ethics, especially from within the continental tradition. Rather than provide a normative ethics Raffoul shows the need, first of all, to inquire into the meaning of ethics or what he calls the ethicality of ethics. He shows that the tradition of continental philosophy, notably in the form of phenomenology, has important resources for demonstrating this. There is a great deal to admire in this book and one can only look forward to Raffoul's future work.
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