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Emma Goldman called Voltairine de Cleyre "the most gifted and
brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced." Yet her writings
and speeches on anarchism and feminism--as radical, passionate, and
popular at the time as Goldman's--are virtually unknown today. This
important book brings de Cleyre's eloquent and incisive work out of
undeserved obscurity. Twenty-one essays are reprinted here,
including her classic works: "Anarchism and the American
Tradition," "The Dominant Idea," and "Sex Slavery." Three
biographical essays are also included: two new ones by Sharon
Presley and Crispin Sartwell, and a rarely reprinted one by Emma
Goldman. At a time when the mainstream women's movement asked only
for the right to vote and rarely challenged the status quo, de
Cleyre demanded an end to sex roles, called for economic
independence for women, autonomy within and without marriage, and
offered a radical critique of the role of the Church and State in
oppressing women. In today's world of anti-globalization actions,
de Cleyre's anarchist ideals of local self-rule, individual
conscience, and decentralization of power still remain fresh and
relevant.
Sartwell presents an extreme and provocative philosophy of life. He
explores what happens if we love this world precisely as it is,
with all of its pain, with all of its evil, with all of its bizarre
and arbitrary and monstrous thereness. In a highly personal and
brutally direct style, Sartwell explores the themes of
transgressive sexuality, political anarchism, addiction, death, and
embodiment. The author engages contemporary and historical debates
in cultural criticism, metaphysics, ethics, and political
philosophy, and expresses deep suspicions about them. He asserts
that scientific philosophical conceptualization is a movement
toward death, a rejection of reality. Moral and political values -
the ethical rejection of the particular precisely from within the
particular - are, Sartwell claims, an assault on human
authenticity. Thus, transgression - which is described as the
affirmation of embodiment through obscenity - is something we
radically require.
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it's also in the
language we use and everywhere in the world around us. In this
elegant, witty, and ultimately profound meditation on what is
beautiful, Crispin Sartwell begins with six words from six
different cultures - ancient Greek's 'to kalon', the Japanese idea
of 'wabi-sabi', Hebrew's 'yapha', the Navajo concept 'hozho',
Sanskrit 'sundara', and our own English-language 'beauty'. Each
word becomes a door onto another way of thinking about, and looking
at, what is beautiful in the world, and in our lives. In Sartwell's
hands these six names of beauty - and there could be thousands more
- are revealed as simple and profound ideas about our world and our
selves.
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it's also in the
language we use and everywhere in the world around us. In this
elegant, witty, and ultimately profound meditation on what is
beautiful, Crispin Sartwell begins with six words from six
different cultures - ancient Greek's 'to kalon', the Japanese idea
of 'wabi-sabi', Hebrew's 'yapha', the Navajo concept 'hozho',
Sanskrit 'sundara', and our own English-language 'beauty'.
Each word becomes a door onto another way of thinking about, and
looking at, what is beautiful in the world, and in our lives. In
Sartwell's hands these six names of beauty - and there could be
thousands more - are revealed as simple and profound ideas about
our world and our selves.
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Rorty and Beyond (Hardcover)
Randall Auxier, Eli Kramer, Krzysztof Piotr Skowronski; Contributions by Crispin Sartwell, Wojciech Malecki, …
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R3,019
Discovery Miles 30 190
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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For better or worse, Rorty has shaped the trajectory of academic
philosophy. A decade after his passing, his legacy is ever present,
especially in context of the growth of the far right, the struggle
over the meaning of justice and equity, and the ecological crises
we face. Edited by Randall Auxier, Eli Kramer, and Krzysztof Piotr
Skowronski, Rorty and Beyond brings together leading international
philosophers from the United States and Europe to reevaluate
Rorty's legacy and explore what lies beyond his life and work. This
collection covers a diverse territory, exploring Rorty's legacy
regarding theories of truth, accounts of nature and naturalism, the
historical situation of professional philosophy, the private and
public aspects of religion, the place of literature in cultural
politics, and points beyond Rorty, such as what we may hope for
after his critical attack on certainty and ultimacy. Scholars,
specialists, and those new to Rorty will all find insight, useful
criticism, and edification in this volume.
In End of Story, Crispin Sartwell maintains that the academy is
obsessed with language, and with narrative in particular. Narrative
has been held to constitute or explain time, action, value,
history, and human identity. Sartwell argues that this obsession
with language and narrative has become a sort of disease. Pitting
such thinkers as Kierkegaard, Bataille, and Epictetus against the
narrativism of MacIntyre, Ricoeur, and Aristotle, Sartwell
celebrates the ways narratives and selves disintegrate and
recommends a lapse into ecstatic or mundane incoherence. As the
book rollicks through Wodehouse, Thoreau, the Book of Job,
still-life painting, and Sartwell's autobiography, there emerges a
hopeful if bizarre new sense of who we are and what we can be.
Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale
Hurston, Malcolm X - their words speak firmly, eloquently and
personally of the impact of white America on the lives of
African-Americans. Black autobiographical discourses, from the
earliest slave narratives to contemporary urban raps, have each in
their own way gauged and confronted the character of society. For
Crispin Sartwell, as philosopher, cultural critic, and white male,
these texts provide a rare opportunity of gaining access to the
contents and core of white identity. There is, Sartwell contends, a
fundamental elusiveness to that identity. Whiteness defines itself
as normative, as a neutral form of the human condition, marking all
other forms of identity as "racial" or "ethnic" deviations.
Invisible to itself, white identity seeks to define its essence
over and against those other identities, in effect defining itself
through opposition and oppression. By maintaining fictions of black
licentiousness, violence, and corruption, white identity is able to
cast itself as humane, benevolent, and pure; the stereotype
fabricates not only the oppressed but the oppressor as well.
Sartwell argues that African-American autobiography perceives white
identity from a particular and unique vantage point: one that is
knowledgeable and intimate, yet removed from the white world and
thus unencumbered by its obfuscating claims to normativity.
"I suggest that although at any given place and moment the
aesthetic expressions of a political system just are that political
system, the concepts are separable. Typically, aesthetic aspects of
political systems shift in their meaning over time, or even are
inverted or redeployed with an entirely transformed effect. You
cannot understand politics without understanding the aesthetics of
politics, but you cannot understand aesthetics as politics. The
point is precisely to show the concrete nodes at which two distinct
discourses coincide or connive, come apart or coalesce." from
Political Aesthetics
Juxtaposing and connecting the art of states and the art of art
historians with vernacular or popular arts such as reggae and
hip-hop, Crispin Sartwell examines the reach and claims of
political aesthetics. Most analysts focus on politics as discursive
systems, privileging text and reducing other forms of expression to
the merely illustrative. He suggests that we need to take much more
seriously the aesthetic environment of political thought and
action.
Sartwell argues that graphic style, music, and architecture are
more than the propaganda arm of political systems; they are its
constituents. A noted cultural critic, Sartwell brings together the
disciplines of political science and political philosophy,
philosophy of art and art history, in a new way, clarifying basic
notions of aesthetics beauty, sublimity, and representation and
applying them in a political context. A general argument about the
fundamental importance of political aesthetics is interspersed with
a group of stimulating case studies as disparate as Leni
Riefenstahl's films and Black Nationalist aesthetics, the Dead
Kennedys and Jeffersonian architecture."
Emma Goldman called Voltairine de Cleyre "the most gifted and
brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced." Yet her writings
and speeches on anarchism and feminism--as radical, passionate, and
popular at the time as Goldman's--are virtually unknown today. This
important book brings de Cleyre's eloquent and incisive work out of
undeserved obscurity. Twenty-one essays are reprinted here,
including her classic works: "Anarchism and the American
Tradition," "The Dominant Idea," and "Sex Slavery." Three
biographical essays are also included: two new ones by Sharon
Presley and Crispin Sartwell, and a rarely reprinted one by Emma
Goldman. At a time when the mainstream women's movement asked only
for the right to vote and rarely challenged the status quo, de
Cleyre demanded an end to sex roles, called for economic
independence for women, autonomy within and without marriage, and
offered a radical critique of the role of the Church and State in
oppressing women. In today's world of anti-globalization actions,
de Cleyre's anarchist ideals of local self-rule, individual
conscience, and decentralization of power still remain fresh and
relevant.
Crispin Sartwell here unleashes a quick and brutal rejection of the
traditional arguments for state legitimacy, and when he considers
the classics of Western political philosophy - Hobbes, Locke,
Rousseau, Hegel, Hume, Bentham, Rawls and Habernas, among others -
he finds their positions not only wrong, but embarrassingly bad.
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