Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-248) and index.
Surplus being: the Kantian legacy -- The poetics of authorship: Kierkegaard's dilemma -- Heidegger's poetics of the possible -- Heidegger's gods -- Ideology and utopia: the social imaginary (Ricoeur I) -- Hermeneutics of myth and tradition (Ricoeur II) -- The narrative imagination: between poetics and ethics (Ricoeur III) -- Levinas and the ethics of imagining -- Ethics and the right to resist: Patočka's testimony -- Myth and sacrificial scapegoats: on René Girard -- Derrida's ethical return -- Derrida's ethics of dialogue -- Myths of utopia and ideology: from Yeats to Joyce -- Postmodern mirrors of fiction: Rushdie, Wolfe, and Kundera -- Painting and postmodernity.