PHAIS Seminar Series Week 6: Professor Estelle Ferrarese (Philosophy)

The PHAIS Seminar Series meets weekly in term time to discuss a paper by a visiting Philosopher, Historian, Art Historian or a member of our academic staff.

Ethical consumption and social totality. An Adornian critique of our ways of consuming

Professor Estelle Ferrarese, Université de Picardie 

My paper aims to bring to light the way in which ethical consumption participates in a social totality modelled on exchange. It is not so much the market’s specific productions and contents that interests me here, as its forms, to the extent that they affect and pervade all spheres of life.  With Adorno, I will first highlight what the market does to moral intention by translating it into the language of prices. I will then show that there is a vainness to ethical consumption as a critique of capitalism insofar as it focuses on immoderation.

Estelle Ferrarese is a full-professor of moral and political philosophy at Picardie-Jules-Verne University (France). She has been a Visiting Professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, an Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation fellow at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin, and a research fellow at the Marc Bloch Franco-German Center of Social Science Research, in Berlin.
Her books include : Le Marché de la vertu. Critique de la consommation éthique, Vrin, 2023; Vulnerability and Critical Theory, Brill, 2018, The Politics of Vulnerability (ed.), Routledge, 2017 ; La Fragilité du souci des autres. Adorno et le care, Lyon, Editions de l’ENS, 2018 (engl transl : The Fragility of Concern for Others. Adorno and the ethics of care, Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Ethique et politique de l'espace public. Habermas et la discussion, Paris, Vrin, 2015. 

The seminar will be delivered in person, but a Zoom link will be available for those who wish to attend remotely. Please email phaispg@essex.ac.uk to request the link.