Michael Paradiso-Michau, PhD

Books

• Creolizing Frankenstein. Rowman & Littlefield. 2024.
  This original collection investigates how Mary Shelley's 200-year-old novel is the product of creolization--the intentional conglomeration of scientific, mythological, political, and social discourses. The book traces how the story has creolized itself into life and culture as a new mythology and political statement for each generation.
• Reflections on the Religious, the Ethical, and the Political. Lexington Books. 2012.
  This volume consists of a thematic arrangement of fourteen essays on the interconnected issues of religion, ethics, and politics. A trans- or post-disciplinary praxis-based approach is advanced and employed, as the essays here collected provide a critical supplement to the author’s published book projects.
• Reflections on the Religious, the Ethical, and the Political. Lexington Books. 2012.
  Reflections on the Religious, the Ethical, and the Political presents a thematic arrangement of fourteen essays on the interconnected issues of religion, ethics, and politics. A trans- or post-disciplinary praxis-based approach is advanced and employed, as the essays collected provide a critical supplement to Calvin O. Schrag's published book projects.

Published articles

• Introduction: Listening to Our Monsters. Listening 52 (3): 114-116. 2017.
• The Widow, the Orphan, and the Stranger. Radical Philosophy Review 11 (2): 187-195. 2008.
• The Ethical And Religious Revelation Of The Akedah. Minerva 9 134-152. 2005.
  This paper first advances a Kantian, and then a Levinasian critique of Johannes de Silentio’s admiration forAbraham’s faith in his Fear and Trembling. Kant and Levinas fear that Silentio’s praise for Abraham maybe misdirected. However, I propose that Kierkegaard’s authored text, Works of Love, helps us to understandthe story more fully. One goal of this paper is to advance a critical rereading of …Read more

  This paper first advances a Kantian, and then a Levinasian critique of Johannes de Silentio’s admiration forAbraham’s faith in his Fear and Trembling. Kant and Levinas fear that Silentio’s praise for Abraham maybe misdirected. However, I propose that Kierkegaard’s authored text, Works of Love, helps us to understandthe story more fully. One goal of this paper is to advance a critical rereading of Silentio, Kierkegaard, Kant,and Levinas and their understandings of the first and second great commandments, in terms of loving Godand loving the neighbor. Another goal of this paper is to critically engage nineteenth century Christian and contemporary Jewish philosophies and theologies, and to explore their terrainsof convergence, specifically that to love God in the proper way is equivalent to loving one’s neighbor

Book reviews

• Ethical alterity and asymmetrical reciprocity: A Levinasian reading of works of love. Continental Philosophy Review 40 (3): 331-347. 2006.
  Following and extending the recent tradition of Kierkegaard–Levinas comparativists, this essay offers a Levinasian commentary on salient aspects of Kierkegaard’s ethico-religious deliberations in Works of Love, a text that we are unsure whether or not Levinas actually read. Against some post/modern interpreters, I argue that one should adopt both a Jewish and a Christian perspective (rather than a…Read more

  Following and extending the recent tradition of Kierkegaard–Levinas comparativists, this essay offers a Levinasian commentary on salient aspects of Kierkegaard’s ethico-religious deliberations in Works of Love, a text that we are unsure whether or not Levinas actually read. Against some post/modern interpreters, I argue that one should adopt both a Jewish and a Christian perspective (rather than an oversimplified either/or point of view) in exploring the sometimes “seamless passages” between Kierkegaard and Levinas’s thought. The first argument of this essay is that interhuman ethical relationships, as seen by Kierkegaard and Levinas, are premised upon an original asymmetry or inequality. Ethical alterity requires more on the part of the responsible I for the destitute Other. However, this original ethical alterity is not at all the last word in loving and healthy human relationships. In the second section of this study, a dual asymmetry on the part of each participating human yields an “asymmetrical reciprocity,” or in Kierkegaard’s words, “infinity on both sides.” While they are of no concern␣to me, your ethical duties to me are revealed to you upon our face-to-face encounter.Here I offer a Kierkegaardian–Levinasian response to Hegel’s and Buber’s thoughts that humans essentially desire recognition, mutuality, and reciprocity from one another in intersubjective relationships. Hegel and Buber are more or less correct, but when seen from a Kierkegaardian and Levinasian perspective, we are offered resources for understanding more precisely how and why their accounts are accurate. Hegel and Buber offer us the second phase of the argument, whereas Kierkegaard and Levinas show us the first and primary phase of interhuman relationships – the revealed and infinite ethical responsibility to the Other person