The Ethics of Immediacy

Jeffrey McCurry’s superb study – of Freud, Virginia Woolf, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty – reveals the essence of the phenomenological project as shared by all three: a focus on the ephemeral yet indelible immediacy of our existence as living subjects. In so doing he sheds original light on the ethical, esthetic, and spiritual resonances of this project, thereby locating phenomenology at the beating heart of modernist life and thought. McCurry shows that Woolf and Merleau-Ponty are key participants in what he terms the Freudian age. At a still deeper level he demonstrates that Freud himself is imbued with the spirit of phenomenology. This is a book of unusual subtlety that offers a novel orientation toward key questions of psychology and philosophy. * Louis Sass, Distinguished Professor of Clinical Psychology, Rutgers University, USA, and author of Madness and Modernism and The Paradoxes of Delusion * It is generally thought phenomenology and psychoanalysis do not go together.The Ethics of Immediacy shows the limits of this view. Jeffrey McCurry demonstrates and develops Freudian interpolations in Woolf’s modernist literature and in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, and in doing, so incites the possibility of a renewed ethics from immediate experience. This book launches an ethical depth-charge to its reader: without any ideal, normative prescription, or even expectation, what responsibility, if any, does one have to interrogate immediate experience in one’s own life and times? * Athena V. Colman, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Brock University, Canada *