Common Growl

Thomas Claviez is Professor for Literary Theory at the University of Bern, where he is responsible for the MA program in World Literature. He is the author of Grenz fälle: Mythos- Ideologie- American Studies (1998) and Aesthetics and Ethics: Otherness and Moral Imagination from Aristotle to Levinas and from Uncle Tom's Cabin to House Made of Dawn (2008) and the coauthor, with Dietmar Wetzel, of Zur Aktualität von Jacques Rancière (2016). He has published widely on issues of community, recognition, literary theory, and moral philosophy. He is the editor of The Conditions of Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics on the Threshold of the Possible (2013) and of The Common Growl: Towards a Poetics of Precarious Community (2016) and the coeditor of Aesthetic Transgressions: Modernity, Liberalism, and the Function of Literature (2006) and of Critique of Authenticity (2019). He is currently working on a monograph with the title A Metonymic Community? Towards a New Poetics of Contingency.Jean-Luc Nancy (1940–2021) was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université de Strasbourg and one of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century's foremost thinkers of politics, art, and the body. His wide-ranging thought runs through many books, including Being Singular Plural, The Ground of the Image, Corpus, The Disavowed Community, and Sexistence. His book The Intruder was adapted into an acclaimed film by Claire Denis.

"Revolt does not discourse, it growls. What does 'growl' mean? It's almost an onomatopoeia. It means to bawl, bellow, and roar. It means to shout together, to murmur, mumble, grouse, become indignant, protest, become enraged together. One tends to grumble alone but people growl in common. The common growl is a subterranean torrent: it passes underneath, making everything tremble."--from Jean-Luc Nancy's Foreword

• Foreword: The Common Growl Jean-Luc Nancy Introduction: Toward a Poetics of Community Thomas Claviez The Poetics of Community Community and Ethnos Robert J. C. Young A Metonymic Community? Toward a Poetics of Contingency Thomas Claviez Poetics of Anxiety and Security: The Problem of Speech and Action in Our Time Homi K. Bhabha Literature, the World, and You Djelal Kadir The Politics of Aesthetics Literary Communities Jacques Ranciere Antiracism and (re)Humanization Paul Gilroy Sociological Reflections Can Society Be Commodities All the Way Down? Post-Polanyian Reflections on Capitalist Crisis Nancy Fraser Two Examples of Recent Aesthetico-Political Forms of Community: Occupy and Sharing Economy Dietmar Wetzel Acknowledgments Works Cited List of Contributors Index