Holding and Letting Go

A valuable addition to the literature on personhood and identity. Like most such texts, it recognizes the ambiguity of the concepts. However, while other texts then try to clarify and fix the ambiguity, Lindemann goes in another direction. She embraces it by presenting and examining the many ways in which practices of social connection, interaction, and disconnection shape, preserve, and even damage an individual's personal and social identity...In an age where the daily news contains stories of murder, rape, and persecution of humans by humans for reasons related to an inability or unwillingness to tolerate others for who they are, Lindemann provides no platitudes. Rather, she calls attention to the real, rollup-your-sleeves phroenetic work of personhood that can only be approached in steps and measured by effort. Her book resonates long after the last page is turned. * Constance K. Perry, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics *
Holding and Letting Go is deceptively easy to read. The prose is so delightful and the observations so incisive that it is difficult to put it down. But a great deal of hard philosophical work is being done in these pages, and there is intricate engagement with a wide range of important contemporary positions. What emerges is a rich, new structure for thinking about the nature of identity and its relation to the kinds of ethical dilemmas and difficulties we face every day. We are shown not just a compelling and thought-provoking set of views about these issues, but a new way of thinking about them, one that promises to shed some light where things have been notoriously opaque... Holding and Letting Go is a sophisticated, tender-hearted, and clear-eyed view of persons that provides original and compelling insights into what we are and why it matters. We will be engaging with it for a long time to come. * Hypatia *
In this book Hilde Lindemann shows us that good philosophy needs good writing, but also that good writing can contribute to good philosophy... it is how moral philosophy should be done. * Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *
In this wonderfully wise book Hilde Lindemann weaves stories into theory to help us see how we weave stories into lives, and how through these stories we hold each other in personhood-for good and for ill. Her stories put flesh on the dry bones of much-discussed, overly-abstracted philosophical problems; and in so doing she makes a case for philosophical theorizing as an embodied, engaged, emotionally and socially responsive practice. * Naomi Scheman, University of Minnesota *
With her characteristic lucid and engaging prose, Hilde Lindemann combines philosophical depth with richness of concrete detail in her new book * a book that significantly extends and deepens the narrative approach to bioethics that she founded in her Damaged Identities; Narrative Repair. In Holding and Letting Go, she compellingly demonstrates how identity and personhood are substantial achievements that often depend upon the help and participation of others. This important book shows the complexity of issues concerning personal identity, intimacy, and embodiment, and their centrality to key debates in the ethics of health care throughout the life cycle.Rebecca Kukla, Georgetown University *
Lindemann writes with great sensitivity to the complexities of everyday identity work, and, one suspects, with no more and no less precision than the practice of personhood allows." * The Philosophers' Magazine *
Lindemann manages to pull off that rarest of rare feats in academic philosophical writing: to say something that is at the same time philosophically insightful and universally relevant for beings like ourselves... * Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal *