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Signs of Paradox - Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures (Hardcover)
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Signs of Paradox - Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures (Hardcover)
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Starting from the minimal principle of generative
anthropology--that human culture originates as "the deferral of
violence through representation"--the author proposes a new
understanding of the fundamental concepts of metaphysics and an
explanation of the historical problematic that underlies the
postmodern "end of culture."
Part I begins with the paradoxical emergence of the "vertical" sign
from the "horizontal" world of appetite. Two persons reaching for
the same object are a minimal model of this emergence; their
"pragmatic paradox" can be resolved only by substituting the
representation of the object for its appropriation. The nature of
paradox and the related notion of irony, as well as the fundamental
concepts of being, thinking, and signification, are rethought on
the basis of this triangular model, leading to an anthropological
interpretation of the origin of philosophy and semiotics in Plato's
"Ideas." Part I concludes with an exploration of the psychoanalytic
categories of the unconscious and the erotic.
Part II develops the idea that material exchange originates in the
"sparagmos" or violent rendering of the sacrificial victim from
which each participant obtains a roughly equal portion. The
dependence of the process on the central victimary figure
culminates in the Holocaust, the extermination of the Jews, whose
crucial role in Western culture is their rejection of the central
image in favor of peripheral exchange. As a result, postmodern
dialogue becomes dominated by the rhetoric of victimage, and the
culture of centrality gives way to an aesthetic of the marginal.
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