Stathis Gourgouris - Böcker

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 Boétie, Schmitt, and Freud, to contemporary thinkers such as Clastres, Said, Castoriadis, Žižek, 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.

Nothing Sacred makes a bold call for reconceptualizing the projects of humanism and democracy as creative sources of emancipatory meaning, from the immediate political sphere to the farthest reaches of planetary ways of living.Restaging Aristotle’s classic notion of the “political animal” in broad historical and geographical frames, Stathis Gourgouris explores the autopoietic capacities of human-being in society, while developing new frameworks of anticolonial humanism and radical democracy as the only worthy adversaries of neoliberal capitalism.This reconfigured anthropological horizon enables us to imagine new ways of living by learning to pursue a radical politics of autonomy and a planetary vision that upholds life-affirming coexistence and equal sharing against the fetishism of hierarchy and servitude, money and technologic, sovereignty and endless growth.Written with daring, erudition, and anarchic contestation, this book seeks the political through a poetic perspective. Nothing Sacred rejects niche thinking in the academy and engages a vast domain of reflections on the problem of human-being in today’s dismal world.

Nothing Sacred makes a bold call for reconceptualizing the projects of humanism and democracy as creative sources of emancipatory meaning, from the immediate political sphere to the farthest reaches of planetary ways of living.Restaging Aristotle’s classic notion of the “political animal” in broad historical and geographical frames, Stathis Gourgouris explores the autopoietic capacities of human-being in society, while developing new frameworks of anticolonial humanism and radical democracy as the only worthy adversaries of neoliberal capitalism.This reconfigured anthropological horizon enables us to imagine new ways of living by learning to pursue a radical politics of autonomy and a planetary vision that upholds life-affirming coexistence and equal sharing against the fetishism of hierarchy and servitude, money and technologic, sovereignty and endless growth.Written with daring, erudition, and anarchic contestation, this book seeks the political through a poetic perspective. Nothing Sacred rejects niche thinking in the academy and engages a vast domain of reflections on the problem of human-being in today’s dismal 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.

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.

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, itsothers. 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.

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, itsothers. 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.

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.

This volume, the first sustained critical work on the French political philosopher Étienne 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, Étienne Balbar, J. M. Bernstein, Judith Butler, Monique David-Ménard, Hanan Elsayed, Didier Fassin, Stathis Gourgouris, Bernard E. Harcourt, Jacques Lezra, Patrice Maniglier, Warren Montag, Adi Ophir, Bruce Robbins, Ann Laura Stoler, Gary Wilder

This volume, the first sustained critical work on the French political philosopher Étienne 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, Étienne Balbar, J. M. Bernstein, Judith Butler, Monique David-Ménard, Hanan Elsayed, Didier Fassin, Stathis Gourgouris, Bernard E. Harcourt, Jacques Lezra, Patrice Maniglier, Warren Montag, Adi Ophir, Bruce Robbins, Ann Laura Stoler, Gary Wilder