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Against the backdrop of ever-increasing nationalist violence during
the last decade of the twentieth century, this book challenges
standard analyses of nation formation by elaborating on the
nation's dream-like hold over the modern social imagination.
Stathis Gourgouris argues that the national fantasy lies at the
core of the Enlightenment imaginary, embodying its central paradox:
the intertwining of anthropological universality with the primacy
of a cultural ideal. Crucial to the operation of this paradox and
fundamental in its ambiguity is the figure of Greece, the universal
alibi and cultural predicate behind national-cultural consolidation
throughout colonialist Europe. The largely unpredictable
institution of a modern Greek nation in 1830 undoes the
interweaving of Enlightenment and Philhellenism, whose centrifugal
strands continue to unravel the certainty of European history, down
to the internal predicaments of the European Union or the tragedy
of the Balkan conflicts. This 25th Anniversary edition of the book
includes a new preface by the author in which he situates the
book's original insights in retrospect against the newer
developments in the social and political conditions of a now
globalized world: the neocolonial resurgence of nationalism and
racism, the failure of social democratic institutions, the crisis
of sovereignty and citizenship, and the brutal conditions of
stateless peoples.
This volume, the first sustained critical work on the French
political philosopher Etienne Balibar, collects essays by sixteen
prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists,
sociologists, and literary critics who each identify, define, and
explore a central concept in Balibar's thought. The result is a
hybrid lexicon-engagement that makes clear the depth and importance
of Balibar's contribution to the most urgent topics in contemporary
thought. The book shows the continuing vitality of materialist
thought across the humanities and social sciences and will be
fundamental for understanding the philosophical bases of the
contemporary left critique of globalization, neoliberalism, and the
articulation of race, racism, and economic exploitation.
Contributors: Emily Apter, Etienne Balbar, J. M. Bernstein, Judith
Butler, Monique David-Menard, Hanan Elsayed, Didier Fassin, Stathis
Gourgouris, Bernard E. Harcourt, Jacques Lezra, Patrice Maniglier,
Warren Montag, Adi Ophir, Bruce Robbins, Ann Laura Stoler, Gary
Wilder
What is the process by which literature might provide us with
access to knowledge, and what sort of knowledge might this be? The
question is not simply whether literature thinks, but whether
literature thinks theoretically--whether it has a capacity, without
the external aid of analytical methods that have determined Western
philosophy and science since the Enlightenment, to theorize the
conditions of the world from which it emerges and to which it
addresses itself.
Suspicion about literature's access to knowledge is ancient, at
least as old as Plato's notorious expulsion of the poets from the
city in the "Republic." With full awareness of this classical
background and in dialogue with a broad range of twentieth-century
thinkers, Gourgouris examines a range of literary texts, from
Sophocles' "Antigone" to Don DeLillo's "The Names," as he traces
out his argument that literature possesses an intrinsic theoretical
capacity to make sense of the nonpropositional.
This volume, the first sustained critical work on the French
political philosopher Etienne Balibar, collects essays by sixteen
prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists,
sociologists, and literary critics who each identify, define, and
explore a central concept in Balibar's thought. The result is a
hybrid lexicon-engagement that makes clear the depth and importance
of Balibar's contribution to the most urgent topics in contemporary
thought. The book shows the continuing vitality of materialist
thought across the humanities and social sciences and will be
fundamental for understanding the philosophical bases of the
contemporary left critique of globalization, neoliberalism, and the
articulation of race, racism, and economic exploitation.
Contributors: Emily Apter, Etienne Balbar, J. M. Bernstein, Judith
Butler, Monique David-Menard, Hanan Elsayed, Didier Fassin, Stathis
Gourgouris, Bernard E. Harcourt, Jacques Lezra, Patrice Maniglier,
Warren Montag, Adi Ophir, Bruce Robbins, Ann Laura Stoler, Gary
Wilder
From the earliest times, societies have been seduced by the
temptation of unitary thinking. Recognizing the vulnerability of
existence, people and cultures privilege regimes that confer
authority on a single entity, a sovereign ruler, a transcendental
deity, or an Event, which they embrace with unquestioned devotion.
Such obsessions precipitate contempt for the worldliness of real
bodies in real time and refusal of responsibility and agency. In
The Perils of the One, Stathis Gourgouris offers a philosophical
anthropology that confronts the legacy of "monarchical thinking":
the desire to subjugate oneself to unitary principles and
structures, whether political, moral, theological, or secular. In
wide-ranging essays that are at once poetic and polemical,
intellectual and passionate, Gourgouris reads across politics and
theology, literary and art criticism, psychoanalysis and feminism
in a critique of both political theology and the metaphysics of
secularism. He engages with a range of figures from the Apostle
Paul and Trinitarian theologians, to La Boetie, Schmitt, and Freud,
to contemporary thinkers such as Clastres, Said, Castoriadis,
Zizek, Butler, and Irigaray. At once a broad perspective on human
history and a detailed examination of our present moment, The
Perils of the One offers glimpses of what a counterpolitics of
autonomy would look like from anarchic subjectivities that refuse
external ideals, resist the allure of command and obedience, and
embrace otherness.
Deciding what is and what is not political is a fraught, perhaps
intractably opaque matter. Just who decides the question; on what
grounds; to what ends-these seem like properly political questions
themselves. Deciding what is political and what is not can serve to
contain and restrain struggles, make existing power relations at
once self-evident and opaque, and blur the possibility of
reimagining them differently. Political Concepts seeks to revive
our common political vocabulary-both everyday and academic-and to
do so critically. Its entries take the form of essays in which each
contributor presents her or his own original reflection on a
concept posed in the traditional Socratic question format "What is
X?" and asks what sort of work a rethinking of that concept can do
for us now. The explicitness of a radical questioning of this kind
gives authors both the freedom and the authority to engage,
intervene in, critique, and transform the conceptual terrain they
have inherited. Each entry, either implicitly or explicitly,
attempts to re-open the question "What is political thinking?" Each
is an effort to reinvent political writing. In this setting the
political as such may be understood as a property, a field of
interest, a dimension of human existence, a set of practices, or a
kind of event. Political Concepts does not stand upon a decided
concept of the political but returns in practice and in concern to
the question "What is the political?" by submitting the question to
a field of plural contention. The concepts collected in Political
Concepts are "Arche" (Stathis Gourgouris), "Blood" (Gil Anidjar),
"Colony" (Ann Laura Stoler), "Concept" (Adi Ophir), "Constituent
Power" (Andreas Kalyvas), "Development" (Gayatri Spivak),
"Exploitation" (Etienne Balibar), "Federation" (Jean Cohen),
"Identity" (Akeel Bilgrami), "Rule of Law" (J. M. Bernstein),
"Sexual Difference" (Joan Copjec), and "Translation" (Jacques
Lezra)
Secular criticism is a term invented by Edward Said to denote not a
theory but a practice that counters the tendency of much modern
thinking to reach for a transcendentalist comfort zone, the very
space philosophy wrested away from religion in the name of
modernity. Using this notion as a compass, this book reconfigures
recent secularism debates on an entirely different basis, by
showing (1) how the secular imagination is closely linked to
society's radical poiesis, its capacity to imagine and create
unprecedented forms of worldly existence; and (2) how the space of
the secular animates the desire for a radical democratic politics
that overturns inherited modes of subjugation, whether religious or
secularist.
Gourgouris's point is to disrupt the co-dependent relation between
the religious and the secular hence, his rejection of fashionable
languages of postsecularism in order to engage in a double critique
of heteronomous politics of all kinds. For him, secular criticism
is a form of political being: critical, antifoundational,
disobedient, anarchic, yet not negative for negation's sake but
creative of new forms of collective reflection, interrogation, and
action that alter not only the current terrain of dominant politics
but also the very self-conceptualization of what it means to be
human.
Written in a free and combative style and given both to close
readings of texts and to gazing off into the broad horizon, these
essays cover a range of issues historical and philosophical,
archaic and contemporary, literary and political that ultimately
converge in the significance of contemporary radical politics: the
assembly movements we have seen in various parts of the world in
recent years. The secular imagination demands a radical pedagogy
and unlearning a great many established thought patterns. Its most
important dimension is not battling religion per se but dismantling
theological politics of sovereignty in favor of radical conditions
for social autonomy.
Secular criticism is a term invented by Edward Said to denote not a
theory but a practice that counters the tendency of much modern
thinking to reach for a transcendentalist comfort zone, the very
space philosophy wrested away from religion in the name of
modernity. Using this notion as a compass, this book reconfigures
recent secularism debates on an entirely different basis, by
showing (1) how the secular imagination is closely linked to
society's radical poiesis, its capacity to imagine and create
unprecedented forms of worldly existence; and (2) how the space of
the secular animates the desire for a radical democratic politics
that overturns inherited modes of subjugation, whether religious or
secularist.
Gourgouris's point is to disrupt the co-dependent relation between
the religious and the secular hence, his rejection of fashionable
languages of postsecularism in order to engage in a double critique
of heteronomous politics of all kinds. For him, secular criticism
is a form of political being: critical, antifoundational,
disobedient, anarchic, yet not negative for negation's sake but
creative of new forms of collective reflection, interrogation, and
action that alter not only the current terrain of dominant politics
but also the very self-conceptualization of what it means to be
human.
Written in a free and combative style and given both to close
readings of texts and to gazing off into the broad horizon, these
essays cover a range of issues historical and philosophical,
archaic and contemporary, literary and political that ultimately
converge in the significance of contemporary radical politics: the
assembly movements we have seen in various parts of the world in
recent years. The secular imagination demands a radical pedagogy
and unlearning a great many established thought patterns. Its most
important dimension is not battling religion per se but dismantling
theological politics of sovereignty in favor of radical conditions
for social autonomy.
At the heart of this volume are questions about the psychic
components of the modes of thinking we call "fundamentalist"--that
is, thinking that disavows multiplicities of meaning, abhors
allegorical elements, and strives toward an exclusionary orthodoxy
that codifies not just its own world but that of its adversaries,
its others. The essays address transcendentalist orthodoxies of all
kinds, whether religious or secularist. Fundamentalist elements in
psychoanalysis itself are also placed in question, at the same time
as psychoanalytic thinking and practice is explored as a mode of
knowledge that ultimately unravels fundamentalist tendencies. The
texts in this collection represent a wide array of disciplinary
standpoints. Their overall aspiration is to interrogate discourses
of orthodoxy, literalism, exclusion, and dogma--that is, discourses
obsessed with monolithic (monolingual, monological, monolateral,
monomythical, and certainly monotheistic) encounters with the
world.
What is the process by which literature might provide us with
access to knowledge, and what sort of knowledge might this be? The
question is not simply whether literature thinks, but whether
literature thinks theoretically--whether it has a capacity, without
the external aid of analytical methods that have determined Western
philosophy and science since the Enlightenment, to theorize the
conditions of the world from which it emerges and to which it
addresses itself.
Suspicion about literature's access to knowledge is ancient, at
least as old as Plato's notorious expulsion of the poets from the
city in the "Republic." With full awareness of this classical
background and in dialogue with a broad range of twentieth-century
thinkers, Gourgouris examines a range of literary texts, from
Sophocles' "Antigone" to Don DeLillo's "The Names," as he traces
out his argument that literature possesses an intrinsic theoretical
capacity to make sense of the nonpropositional.
Deciding what is and what is not political is a fraught, perhaps
intractably opaque matter. Just who decides the question; on what
grounds; to what ends-these seem like properly political questions
themselves. Deciding what is political and what is not can serve to
contain and restrain struggles, make existing power relations at
once self-evident and opaque, and blur the possibility of
reimagining them differently. Political Concepts seeks to revive
our common political vocabulary-both everyday and academic-and to
do so critically. Its entries take the form of essays in which each
contributor presents her or his own original reflection on a
concept posed in the traditional Socratic question format "What is
X?" and asks what sort of work a rethinking of that concept can do
for us now. The explicitness of a radical questioning of this kind
gives authors both the freedom and the authority to engage,
intervene in, critique, and transform the conceptual terrain they
have inherited. Each entry, either implicitly or explicitly,
attempts to re-open the question "What is political thinking?" Each
is an effort to reinvent political writing. In this setting the
political as such may be understood as a property, a field of
interest, a dimension of human existence, a set of practices, or a
kind of event. Political Concepts does not stand upon a decided
concept of the political but returns in practice and in concern to
the question "What is the political?" by submitting the question to
a field of plural contention. The concepts collected in Political
Concepts are "Arche" (Stathis Gourgouris), "Blood" (Gil Anidjar),
"Colony" (Ann Laura Stoler), "Concept" (Adi Ophir), "Constituent
Power" (Andreas Kalyvas), "Development" (Gayatri Spivak),
"Exploitation" (Etienne Balibar), "Federation" (Jean Cohen),
"Identity" (Akeel Bilgrami), "Rule of Law" (J. M. Bernstein),
"Sexual Difference" (Joan Copjec), and "Translation" (Jacques
Lezra)
Through his work as a scholar, as a critic, and as a political
commentator, Edward Said asked insistently: Who speaks? For what
and whom? How does an intellectual articulate his or her place in
the West? Or in the developing world? What is the specific
contribution and intervention to be made by the intellectual? This
Social Text special issue in memory of Said examines how he
challenged established authority and identity with these questions
and shaped a culture of criticism.
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