Reject

Irving Goh is Associate Professor of Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject (Fordham University Press, 2014), which won the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Best Book in French and Francophone Studies. His second monograph, L'existence prépositionnelle, was published by Galilée in 2019. With Jean-Luc Nancy, he published The Deconstruction of Sex (Duke University Press, 2021). He is also editor of French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK (Routledge, 2019), coeditor with Verena Andermatt Conley of Nancy Now (Polity, 2014), and coeditor with Timothy Murray of the diacritics special issue on "The Prepositional Senses of Jean-Luc Nancy" (2 volumes, 2014-15).

"Subject, Eject, Reject, Project: 'ject' is the theme, the tone, the issue. Irving Goh understands perfectly the jection without any kind of junction, recognizing that what remains to be thought is just some ject-society or community. In reading The Reject, one begins to join the unjoinable." -- -Jean-Luc Nancy "This book is a rigorous examination of the problems surrounding the returns to/of the subject that have occurred under the motley banner of "French Theory." Closely tracking the discourses of Deleuze, Derrida, and Nancy, the author convincingly argues that what we need today is a better strategy of re-jection. I couldn't agree more!" -- -Gregg Lambert Syracuse University "A highly ambitious, theoretically engaged, and timely response to several strands in recent French philosophical and intellectual thought." -- -Philip Armstrong The Ohio State University "In this ambitious and spirited book Irving Goh traverses a great swath of recent French thought." -Critical Inquiry "In The Reject, Irving Goh not only traces the persistent presence of the subject in the work of Badiou ("the faithful subject of the event"), Ranciere ("the uncounted subject"), Balibar ("the citizen-subject"), Rosi Braidotti ("the critical post-human subject"), and Katherine Hayles ("the flickering post-human subject"), he also provides clear and reasonable arguments as to why this presence poses serious problems for their respective attempts to think community, democracy, religion, love, friendship, the post-secular, and the post-human in wholly new ways...Goh offers one of the most rigorous and carefully articulated responses to the question 'who comes after the subject'" -- -John Paul Ricco L'Esprit Createur (56.3)

• Preface: A Book for Everyone Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: Let's Drop the Subject 1 2. (After) Friendship, Love, and Community 3. The Reject and the "Post-Secular," or Who's Afraid of Religion 4. Prolegomenon to Reject Politics: From Voyous to Becoming-Animal 5. Clinamen, or the Auto-Reject for "Posthuman" Futures 6. Conclusion: Incompossibility, Being-in-Common, Abandonment, and the Auto-Reject Notes Bibliography Index