Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Showing 1 - 12 of 12 matches in All Departments
What does the name Trump stand for? If branding now rules over the production of value, as the coauthors of Sovereignty, Inc. argue, then Trump assumes the status of a master brand whose primary activity is the compulsive work of self-branding--such is the new sovereignty business in which, whether one belongs to his base or not, we are all "incorporated." Drawing on anthropology, political theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and theater, William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, and Aaron Schuster show how politics in the age of Trump functions by mobilizing a contradictory and convoluted enjoyment, an explosive mixture of drives and fantasies that eludes existing portraits of our era. The current political moment turns out to be not so much exceptional as exceptionally revealing of the constitutive tension between enjoyment and economy that has always been a key component of the social order. Santner analyzes the collective dream-work that sustains a new sort of authoritarian charisma or mana, a mana-facturing process that keeps us riveted to an excessively carnal incorporation of sovereignty. Mazzarella examines the contemporary merger of consumer brand and political brand and the cross-contamination of politics and economics, warning against all too easy laments about the corruption of politics by marketing. Schuster, focusing on the extreme theatricality and self-satirical comedy of the present, shows how authority reasserts itself at the very moment of distrust and disillusionment in the system, profiting off its supposed decline. A dazzling diagnostic of our present, Sovereignty, Inc., forces us to come to terms with our complicity in Trump's political presence and will immediately take its place in discussions of contemporary politics.
"The king is dead. Long live the king " In early modern Europe, the king's body was literally sovereign--and the right to rule was immediately transferrable to the next monarch in line upon the king's death. In "The Royal Remains, "Eric L. Santner argues that the "carnal" dimension of thestructures and dynamics of sovereignty hasn't disappeared from politics. Instead, it migrated to a new location--the life of the people--where something royal continues to linger in the way we obsessively track and measure the vicissitudes of our flesh. Santner demonstrates the ways in which democratic societies have continued many of the rituals and practices associated with kingship in displaced, distorted, and usually, unrecognizable forms. He proposes that those strange mental activities Freud first lumped under the category of the unconscious--which often manifest themselves in peculiar physical ways--are really the uncanny second life of these "royal remains," now animated in the body politic of modern neurotic subjects. PairingFreud with Kafka, Carl Schmitt with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Ernst Kantorowicz with Rainer Maria Rilke, Santner generates brilliant readings of multiple texts and traditions of thought en route to reconsidering the sovereign imaginary. Ultimately, "The Royal Remains" locates much of modernity--from biopolitical controversies to modernist literary experiments--in this transition from subjecthood to secular citizenship. This major new work will make a bold and original contribution to discussions of politics, psychoanalysis, and modern art and literature.
In "On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, "Eric Santner puts
Sigmund Freud in dialogue with his contemporary Franz Rosenzweig in
the service of reimagining ethical and political life. By exploring
the theological dimensions of Freud's writings and revealing
unexpected psychoanalytic implications in the religious philosophy
of Rosenzweig's masterwork, "The Star of Redemption, " Santner
makes an original argument for understanding religions of
revelation in therapeutic terms, and offers a penetrating look at
how this understanding suggests fruitful ways of reconceiving
political community.
What does the name Trump stand for? If branding now rules over the production of value, as the coauthors of Sovereignty, Inc. argue, then Trump assumes the status of a master brand whose primary activity is the compulsive work of self-branding--such is the new sovereignty business in which, whether one belongs to his base or not, we are all "incorporated." Drawing on anthropology, political theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and theater, William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, and Aaron Schuster show how politics in the age of Trump functions by mobilizing a contradictory and convoluted enjoyment, an explosive mixture of drives and fantasies that eludes existing portraits of our era. The current political moment turns out to be not so much exceptional as exceptionally revealing of the constitutive tension between enjoyment and economy that has always been a key component of the social order. Santner analyzes the collective dream-work that sustains a new sort of authoritarian charisma or mana, a mana-facturing process that keeps us riveted to an excessively carnal incorporation of sovereignty. Mazzarella examines the contemporary merger of consumer brand and political brand and the cross-contamination of politics and economics, warning against all too easy laments about the corruption of politics by marketing. Schuster, focusing on the extreme theatricality and self-satirical comedy of the present, shows how authority reasserts itself at the very moment of distrust and disillusionment in the system, profiting off its supposed decline. A dazzling diagnostic of our present, Sovereignty, Inc., forces us to come to terms with our complicity in Trump's political presence and will immediately take its place in discussions of contemporary politics.
Untying Things Together helps to clarify the stakes of the last fifty years of literary and cultural theory by proposing the idea of a sexuality of theory. In 1905, Freud published his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the book that established the core psychoanalytic thesis that sexuality is central to formations of the unconscious. With this book, Eric L. Santner inverts Freud's title to take up the sexuality of theory-or, more exactly, the modes of enjoyment to be found in the kinds of critical thinking that, since the 1960s, have laid claim to that ancient word, "theory." Santner unfolds his argument by tracking his own relationship with this tradition and the ways his intellectual and spiritual development has been informed by it. Untying Things Together is both an intellectual history of major theoretical paradigms and a call for their reexamination and renewal. Revisiting many of the topics he has addressed in previous work, Santner proposes a new way of conceptualizing the eros of thinking, attuned to how our minds and bodies individually and collectively incorporate or "encyst" on a void at the heart of things. Rather than proposing a "return to theory," Santner's book simply employs theory as a way of further "(un)tying together" the resources of philosophy, art and literature, theology, psychoanalysis, political thought, and more.
Untying Things Together helps to clarify the stakes of the last fifty years of literary and cultural theory by proposing the idea of a sexuality of theory. In 1905, Freud published his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the book that established the core psychoanalytic thesis that sexuality is central to formations of the unconscious. With this book, Eric L. Santner inverts Freud’s title to take up the sexuality of theory—or, more exactly, the modes of enjoyment to be found in the kinds of critical thinking that, since the 1960s, have laid claim to that ancient word, “theory.” Santner unfolds his argument by tracking his own relationship with this tradition and the ways his intellectual and spiritual development has been informed by it. Untying Things Together is both an intellectual history of major theoretical paradigms and a call for their reexamination and renewal. Revisiting many of the topics he has addressed in previous work, Santner proposes a new way of conceptualizing the eros of thinking, attuned to how our minds and bodies individually and collectively incorporate or “encyst” on a void at the heart of things. Rather than proposing a “return to theory,” Santner’s book simply employs theory as a way of further “(un)tying together” the resources of philosophy, art and literature, theology, psychoanalysis, political thought, and more.
In November 1893, Daniel Paul Schreber, recently named presiding judge of the Saxon Supreme Court, was on the verge of a psychotic breakdown and entered a Leipzig psychiatric clinic. He would spend the rest of the nineteenth century in mental institutions. Once released, he published his "Memoirs of My Nervous Illness" (1903), a harrowing account of real and delusional persecution, political intrigue, and states of sexual ecstasy as God's private concubine. Freud's famous case study of Schreber elevated the "Memoirs "into the most important psychiatric textbook of paranoia. In light of Eric Santner's analysis, Schreber's text becomes legible as a sort of "nerve bible" of "fin-de-siecle" preoccupations and obsessions, an archive of the very phantasms that would, after the traumas of war, revolution, and the end of empire, coalesce into the core elements of National Socialist ideology. The crucial theoretical notion that allows Santner to pass from the "private" domain of psychotic disturbances to the "public" domain of the ideological and political genesis of Nazism is the "crisis of investiture." Schreber's breakdown was precipitated by a malfunction in the rites and procedures through which an individual is endowed with a new social status: his condition became acute just as he was named to a position of ultimate symbolic authority. The "Memoirs" suggest that we cross the threshold of modernity into a pervasive atmosphere of crisis and uncertainty when acts of symbolic investiture no longer usefully transform the subject's self understanding. At such a juncture, the performative force of these rites of institution may assume the shape of a demonic persecutor, some "other" who threatens our borders and our treasures. Challenging other political readings of Schreber, Santner denies that Schreber's delusional system--his own private Germany--actually prefigured the totalitarian solution to this defining structural crisis of modernity. Instead, Santner shows how this tragic figure succeeded in avoiding the totalitarian temptation by way of his own series of perverse identifications, above all with women and Jews."
"The king is dead. Long live the king " In early modern Europe, the king's body was literally sovereign--and the right to rule was immediately transferrable to the next monarch in line upon the king's death. In "The Royal Remains, "Eric L. Santner argues that the "carnal" dimension of thestructures and dynamics of sovereignty hasn't disappeared from politics. Instead, it migrated to a new location--the life of the people--where something royal continues to linger in the way we obsessively track and measure the vicissitudes of our flesh. Santner demonstrates the ways in which democratic societies have continued many of the rituals and practices associated with kingship in displaced, distorted, and usually, unrecognizable forms. He proposes that those strange mental activities Freud first lumped under the category of the unconscious--which often manifest themselves in peculiar physical ways--are really the uncanny second life of these "royal remains," now animated in the body politic of modern neurotic subjects. PairingFreud with Kafka, Carl Schmitt with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Ernst Kantorowicz with Rainer Maria Rilke, Santner generates brilliant readings of multiple texts and traditions of thought en route to reconsidering the sovereign imaginary. Ultimately, "The Royal Remains" locates much of modernity--from biopolitical controversies to modernist literary experiments--in this transition from subjecthood to secular citizenship. This major new work will make a bold and original contribution to discussions of politics, psychoanalysis, and modern art and literature.
In his "Duino Elegies," Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals
enjoy direct access to a realm of being--the open--concealed from
humans by the workings of consciousness and self-consciousness. In
his own reading of Rilke, Martin Heidegger reclaims the open as the
proper domain of human existence but suggests that human life
remains haunted by vestiges of an animal-like relation to its
surroundings. Walter Benjamin, in turn, was to show that such
vestiges--what Eric Santner calls the "creaturely"--have a
biopolitical aspect: they are linked to the processes that inscribe
life in the realm of power and authority.
In "On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, "Eric Santner puts
Sigmund Freud in dialogue with his contemporary Franz Rosenzweig in
the service of reimagining ethical and political life. By exploring
the theological dimensions of Freud's writings and revealing
unexpected psychoanalytic implications in the religious philosophy
of Rosenzweig's masterwork, "The Star of Redemption, " Santner
makes an original argument for understanding religions of
revelation in therapeutic terms, and offers a penetrating look at
how this understanding suggests fruitful ways of reconceiving
political community.
In "Civilization and Its Discontents," Freud made abundantly clear
what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in
Leviticus 19: 18 and then elaborated in Christian teachings, to
love one's neighbor as oneself. "Let us adopt a naive attitude
towards it," he proposed, "as though we were hearing it for the
first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of
surprise and bewilderment." After the horrors of World War II, the
Holocaust, Stalinism, and Yugoslavia, Leviticus 19: 18 seems even
less conceivable--but all the more urgent now--than Freud imagined.
|
You may like...
Freedom - Stories Celebrating the…
Amnesty International USA
Paperback
Recollections of a Lifetime - or Men and…
Samuel Griswold Goodrich
Paperback
R703
Discovery Miles 7 030
|