Download or read book Untimely Politics written by Samuel A. Chambers and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2003-12 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The standard, linear view of history is founded on the belief that political outcomes are predetermined by what has gone before. This book challenges this view, arguing for what Samuel A. Chambers calls an untimely politics which renders the past problematic and the future unpredictable. This pathbreaking argument is advanced through a close reading of key texts in political theory and by entering into debates involving metaphysics, philosophy of language, and psychoanalysis versus discursive analysis. Chambers focuses on the theme of the relevance of language analysis to political debate, answering those critics who insist discourse approaches to politics are irrelevant. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida are used to challenge the political burden which is placed on language analysis to prove its value in the real world. Drawing from political theory and cultural studies Chambers takes on the same-sex marriage debate, showing how the use and misuse of language has contributed to an impasse that is not likely to be broken. Wide ranging and insightful, Untimely Politics makes a timely plea for a more politically relevant and culturally engaged form of intellectual engagement.
Download or read book The Nick of Time written by Elizabeth Grosz and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2004-12-06 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pathbreaking philosophical work, Elizabeth Grosz points the way toward a theory of becoming to replace the prevailing ontologies of being in social, political, and biological discourse. Arguing that theories of temporality have significant and underappreciated relevance to the social dimensions of science and the political dimensions of struggle, Grosz engages key theoretical concerns related to the reality of time. She explores the effect of time on the organization of matter and on the emergence and development of biological life. Considering how the relentless forward movement of time might be conceived in political and social terms, she begins to formulate a model of time that incorporates the future and its capacity to supersede and transform the past and present. Grosz develops her argument by juxtaposing the work of three major figures in Western thought: Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson. She reveals that in theorizing time as an active, positive phenomenon with its own characteristics and specific effects, each of these thinkers had a profound effect on contemporary understandings of the body in relation to time. She shows how their allied concepts of life, evolution, and becoming are manifest in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Luce Irigaray. Throughout The Nick of Time, Grosz emphasizes the political and cultural imperative to fundamentally rethink time: the more clearly we understand our temporal location as beings straddling the past and the future without the security of a stable and abiding present, the more transformation becomes conceivable.
Download or read book Untimely Democracy written by Gregory Laski and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Machine generated contents note: -- Table of Contents: -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Democracy's Progress -- Chapter One: On the Possibility of Democracy in the Present-Past: Reading Thomas Jefferson and W.E.B. Du Bois in the Times of Slavery and Freedom -- Chapter Two: Narrating the Present-Past in Frederick Douglass's Life and Times -- Chapter Three: Making Reparation; or, How to Count the Wrongs of Slavery -- Chapter Four: Failed Futures: Of Prophecy and Pessimism at the Nadir -- Chapter Five: Pauline E. Hopkins's Untimely Democracy (Stasis, Agitation, Agency) -- Epilogue: Democracy's Plunges
Download or read book Untimely Politics written by Samuel Allen Chambers and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the linear view of history which confines or predetermines the outcome of politics, this book argues for an 'untimely' politics, rendering the past problematic and the future unpredictable. Untimely Politicsoffers close readings of key texts in political theory and enters into debates involving metaphysics, philosophy of language, and psychoanalysis versus discursive analysis - all designed to demonstrate that untimeliness expands the scope of the political.The ideas are weaved together around the theme of the relevance of language analysis to political debate, answering those critics who insist discourse approaches to politics are irrelevant. Calling on key texts of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida the book challenges the political burden which is placed on language analysis to prove its value in the real world. To demonstrate his arguments, Samuel Chambers uses the case study of same-sex marriage in the US to interrogate family values politics.In seeking to explore the bearing of contemporary theory on practical political life, this book makes a timely plea for a more politically relevant form of intellectual work.Key Features:* detailed case study of same-sex marriages in the US is used to interrogate family value politics* shows the relevance of contemporary theory to practical political life* makes a plea for a more politically relevant form of intellectual work* aimed at both a Politics and a Cultural Studies readershipBooks in the series are...Valentine and Arditi Polemicization Shapiro Cinematic Political ThoughtChambers Untimely PoliticsElden Speaking Against NumberBowman Post-Marxism Versus Cultural StudiesMarchart Post-Foundational Political ThoughtLittle Democratic Piety
Download or read book Radical Future Pasts written by Romand Coles and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by both well-established and rising new scholars, Radical Future Pasts seeks to open up new possibilities for the practical application of political thought. Unlike conventional "state of the discipline" collections, this volume does not summarize where the field of political theory has been. Rather than accept traditional versions of the political past, the contributors reinterpret both canonical and current texts to demonstrate how politics can be theorized and applied in new ways.
Download or read book Untimely Papers written by Randolph Silliman Bourne and published by . This book was released on 1919 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At head of title: By Randolph Bourne. Old tyrannies.--The war and the intellectuals.--Below the battle.--The collapse of American strategy.--A war diary.--Twilight of idols.--Unfinished fragment on the state.
Download or read book Time and world politics written by Kimberly Hutchings and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers the first authoritative guide to assumptions about time in theories of contemporary world politics. It demonstrates how predominant theories of the international or global ‘present’ are affected by temporal assumptions, grounded in western political thought, that fundamentally shape what we can and cannot know about world politics today. The first part of the book traces the philosophical roots of assumptions about time in contemporary political theory. The second part examines contemporary theories of world politics, including liberal and realist International Relations theories and the work of Habermas, Hardt and Negri, Virilio and Agamben. In each case, it is argued, assumptions about political time ensure the identification of the particular temporality of western experience with the political temporality of the world as such and put the theorist in the unsustainable position of holding the key to the direction of world history. In the final chapter, the book draws on postcolonial and feminist thinking, and the philosophical accounts of political time in the work of Derrida and Deleuze, to develop a new ‘untimely’ way of thinking about time in world politics.
Download or read book A Politics of the Ordinary written by Thomas L. Dumm and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1999-07 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Politics of the Ordinary, Thomas Dumm dramatizes how everyday life in the United States intersects with and is influenced by the power of events, on the one hand, and forces of conformity and normalcy on the other. Combining poststructuralist analysis with a sympathetic reading of a strain of American thought that begins with Emerson and culminates in the work of Stanley Cavell, A Politics of the Ordinary investigates incidents from everyday life, political spectacles, and popular culture. Whether juxtaposing reflections about boredom in rural New Mexico with Emerson's theory of constitutional amendment, Richard Nixon's letter of resignation with Thoreau's writings to overcome quiet desperation, or demonstrating how Disney's Toy Story allegorizes the downsizing of the American white-collar work force, Dumm's constant concern is to show how the ordinary is the primary source of the democratic political imagination.
Download or read book The Untimely Present written by Idelber Avelar and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Untimely Present examines the fiction produced in the aftermath of the recent Latin American dictatorships, particularly those in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Idelber Avelar argues that through their legacy of social trauma and obliteration of history, these military regimes gave rise to unique and revealing practices of mourning that pervade the literature of this region. The theory of postdictatorial writing developed here is informed by a rereading of the links between mourning and mimesis in Plato, Nietzsche's notion of the untimely, Benjamin's theory of allegory, and psychoanalytic / deconstructive conceptions of mourning. Avelar starts by offering new readings of works produced before the dictatorship era, in what is often considered the boom of Latin American fiction. Distancing himself from previous celebratory interpretations, he understands the boom as a manifestation of mourning for literature's declining aura. Against this background, Avelar offers a reassessment of testimonial forms, social scientific theories of authoritarianism, current transformations undergone by the university, and an analysis of a number of novels by some of today's foremost Latin American writers--such as Ricardo Piglia, Silviano Santiago, Diamela Eltit, João Gilberto Noll, and Tununa Mercado. Avelar shows how the 'untimely' quality of these narratives is related to the position of literature itself, a mode of expression threatened with obsolescence. This book will appeal to scholars and students of Latin American literature and politics, cultural studies, and comparative literature, as well as to all those interested in the role of literature in postmodernity.
Download or read book The Politics of Truth and Other Untimely Essays written by Ellis Sandoz and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the historical and theoretical underpinnings of personal liberty and free government and provides an analysis of the crisis of civic consciousness endangering both.
Download or read book Weapons of Democracy written by Jonathan Auerbach and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How and why did public opinion—long cherished as a foundation of democratic government—become an increasing source of concern for American Progressives? Following World War I, political commentator Walter Lippmann worried that citizens increasingly held inaccurate and misinformed beliefs because of the way information was produced, circulated, and received in a mass-mediated society. Lippmann dubbed this manipulative opinion-making process “the manufacture of consent.” A more familiar term for such large-scale persuasion would be propaganda. In Weapons of Democracy, Jonathan Auerbach explores how Lippmann’s stark critique gave voice to a set of misgivings that had troubled American social reformers since the late nineteenth century. Progressives, social scientists, and muckrakers initially drew on mass persuasion as part of the effort to mobilize sentiment for their own cherished reforms, including regulating monopolies, protecting consumers, and promoting disinterested, efficient government. “Propaganda” was associated with public education and consciousness raising for the good of the whole. By the second decade of the twentieth century, the need to muster support for American involvement in the Great War produced the Committee on Public Information, which zealously spread the gospel of American democracy abroad and worked to stifle dissent at home. After the war, public relations firms—which treated publicity as an end in itself—proliferated. Weapons of Democracy traces the fate of American public opinion in theory and practice from 1884 to 1934 and explains how propaganda continues to shape today’s public sphere. The book closely analyzes the work of prominent political leaders, journalists, intellectuals, novelists, and corporate publicists, including Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, George Creel, John Dewey, Julia Lathrop, Ivy Lee, and Edward Bernays. Truly interdisciplinary in both scope and method, this book will appeal to students and scholars in American studies, history, political theory, media and communications, and rhetoric and literary studies.
Download or read book The Road to Somewhere written by David Goodhart and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A robust and timely investigation into the political and moral fault-lines that divide Brexit Britain and Trump's America -- and how a new settlement may be achieved. Several decades of greater economic and cultural openness in the West have not benefited all our citizens. Among those who have been left behind, a populist politics of culture and identity has successfully challenged the traditional politics of Left and Right, creating a new division: between the mobile "achieved" identity of the people from Anywhere, and the marginalized, roots-based identity of the people from Somewhere. This schism accounts for the Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump, the decline of the center-left, and the rise of populism across Europe. David Goodhart's compelling investigation of the new global politics reveals how the Somewhere backlash is a democratic response to the dominance of Anywhere interests, in everything from mass higher education to mass immigration.
Download or read book In the Swarm written by Byung-Chul Han and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-04-07 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prominent German thinker argues that—contrary to “Twitter Revolution” cheerleading—digital communication is destroying political discourse and political action. The shitstorm represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication. —from In the Swarm Digital communication and social media have taken over our lives. In this contrarian reflection on digitized life, Byung-Chul Han counters the cheerleaders for Twitter revolutions and Facebook activism by arguing that digital communication is in fact responsible for the disintegration of community and public space and is slowly eroding any possibility for real political action and meaningful political discourse. In the predigital, analog era, by the time an angry letter to the editor had been composed, mailed, and received, the immediate agitation had passed. Today, digital communication enables instantaneous, impulsive reaction, meant to express and stir up outrage on the spot. “The shitstorm,” writes Han, ”represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication.” Meanwhile, the public, the senders and receivers of these communications have become a digital swarm—not a mass, or a crowd, or Negri and Hardt's antiquated notion of a “multitude,” but a set of isolated individuals incapable of forming a “we,” incapable of calling dominant power relations into question, incapable of formulating a future because of an obsession with the present. The digital swarm is a fragmented entity that can focus on individual persons only in order to make them an object of scandal. Han, one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, describes a society in which information has overrun thought, in which the same algorithms are employed by Facebook, the stock market, and the intelligence services. Democracy is under threat because digital communication has made freedom and control indistinguishable. Big Brother has been succeeded by Big Data.
Download or read book In This Land of Plenty written by Benjamin Talton and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-08-23 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On August 7, 1989, Congressman Mickey Leland departed on a flight from Addis Ababa, with his thirteen-member delegation of Ethiopian and American relief workers and policy analysts, bound for Ethiopia's border with Sudan. This was Leland's seventh official humanitarian mission in his nearly decade-long drive to transform U.S. policies toward Africa to conform to his black internationalist vision of global cooperation, antiracism, and freedom from hunger. Leland's flight never arrived at its destination. The plane crashed, with no survivors. When Leland embarked on that delegation, he was a forty-four-year-old, deeply charismatic, fiercely compassionate, black, radical American. He was also an elected Democratic representative of Houston's largely African American and Latino Eighteenth Congressional District. Above all, he was a self-proclaimed "citizen of humanity." Throughout the 1980s, Leland and a small group of former radical-activist African American colleagues inside and outside Congress exerted outsized influence to elevate Africa's significance in American foreign affairs and to move the United States from its Cold War orientation toward a foreign policy devoted to humanitarianism, antiracism, and moral leadership. Their internationalism defined a new era of black political engagement with Africa. In This Land of Plenty presents Leland as the embodiment of larger currents in African American politics at the end of the twentieth century. But a sober look at his aspirations shows the successes and shortcomings of domestic radicalism and aspirations of politically neutral humanitarianism during the 1980s, and the extent to which the decade was a major turning point in U.S. relations with the African continent. Exploring the links between political activism, electoral politics, and international affairs, Benjamin Talton not only details Leland's political career but also examines African Americans' successes and failures in influencing U.S. foreign policy toward African and other Global South countries.
Download or read book Tomorrow s Parties written by Peter M. Coviello and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-04-19 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Dazzling intelligence radiates here, out from sentences giving such pleasure, yielding the finest devotion I’ve seen to literature’s own theoretical force. Coviello listens, carefully, brilliantly, for the flickerings, the liquid meanderings, all too easily explained as “sexual”—or never even perceived at all. Here is a critic as joyful as Whitman, with his dark core fully afire.” —Kathryn Bond Stockton, Distinguished Professor of English at University of Utah In nineteenth-century America—before the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde, before the public emergence of categories like homo- and heterosexuality—what were the parameters of sex? Did people characterize their sexuality as a set of bodily practices, a form of identification, or a mode of relation? Was it even something an individual could be said to possess? What could be counted as sexuality? Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America provides a rich new conceptual language to describe the movements of sex in the period before it solidified into the sexuality we know, or think we know. Taking up authors whose places in the American history of sexuality range from the canonical to the improbable—from Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and James to Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Mormon founder Joseph Smith—Peter Coviello delineates the varied forms sex could take in the lead-up to its captivation by the codings of “modern” sexuality. While telling the story of nineteenth-century American sexuality, he considers what might have been lostin the ascension of these new taxonomies of sex: all the extravagant, untimely ways of imagining the domain of sex that, under the modern regime of sexuality, have sunken into muteness or illegibility. Taking queer theorizations of temporality in challenging new directions, Tomorrow’s Parties assembles an archive of broken-off, uncreated futures—futures that would not come to be. Through them, Coviello fundamentally reorients our readings of erotic being and erotic possibility in the literature of nineteenth-century America. Peter Coviello is Professor of English at Bowdoin College. He is the author of Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature and the editor of Walt Whitman’s Memoranda During the War. In the America and the Long 19th Century series
Download or read book Lateness and Modernism written by Sarah Collins and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the role of musical figures within 'late modernism', presenting a new understanding of the politics and aesthetics of lateness.
Download or read book What is Media Archaeology written by Jussi Parikka and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This cutting-edge text offers an introduction to the emerging field of media archaeology and analyses the innovative theoretical and artistic methodology used to excavate current media through its past. Written with a steampunk attitude, What is Media Archaeology? examines the theoretical challenges of studying digital culture and memory and opens up the sedimented layers of contemporary media culture. The author contextualizes media archaeology in relation to other key media studies debates including software studies, German media theory, imaginary media research, new materialism and digital humanities. What is Media Archaeology? advances an innovative theoretical position while also presenting an engaging and accessible overview for students of media, film and cultural studies. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the interdisciplinary ties between art, technology and media.
