Wild Materialism
The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Fordham University Press
Published:4th Sep '10
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- Hardback£83.00(9780823232352)
Wild Materialism speaks to three related questions in contemporary political philosophy. How, if different social interests and demands are constitutively antagonistic, can social unity emerge out of heterogeneity? Does such unity require corresponding universals, and, if so, what are they, where are they found, or how are they built? Finally, how must the concept of democracy be revised in response to economic globalization, state and nonstate terrorism, and religious, ethnic, or national fundamentalism?
Polemically rehabilitating the term terror, Lezra argues that it can and should operate as a social universal. Perched perilously somewhere between the private and the public domains, terror is an experience of unboundable, objectless anxiety. It is something other than an interest held by different classes of people; it is not properly a concept (like equality or security) of the sort universal claims traditionally rest on.
Yet terror’s conceptual deficiency, Lezra argues, paradoxically provides the only adequate, secular way to articulate ethical with political judgments. Social terror, he dramatically proposes, is the foundation on which critiques of terrorist fundamentalisms must be constructed. Opening a groundbreaking methodological dialogue
between Freud’s work and Althusser’s late understanding of aleatory materialism, Lezra shows how an ethic of terror, and in the political sphere a radically democratic republic, can be built on what he calls “wild materialism.”
Wild Materialism combines the close reading of cultural texts with detailed treatment of works in the radical-democratic and radical-republican traditions. The originality of its closely argued theses is matched and complemented by the breadth of its focus—encompassing the debates over the “ticking bomb” scenario; the circumstances surrounding ETA’s assassination of Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco in Madrid in 1973; the films of Gillo Pontecorvo; Sade’s republican writing; Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right; and the roots of contemporary radical republicanism in early modern political theology (Bodin, Shakespeare, Parsons, Siliceo).
"Blends a discussion of terror with radical democracy in a way that is thoroughly original ... an important book on a large and crucial topic." -- -Marc Redfield Claremont Graduate University "Wild Materialism is a theoretical event. Not only is it one of the most brilliant, rigorous and transformative books since DeMan's Allegories of Reading or Jameson's Political Unconscious, in it we witness what Althusser would call 'an unexpected birth.' Like other wild children, when Lezra had to think the political-philosophic condition of present democracy, he had to work through and past the critical impasses of biopolitics, sovereignty, radical democratic theory, and post-politics, to inventively refigure an ethic of terror as fright. This fearless book not only revisits political theology's primal scenes, but through its unique standpoint of Spanish Republicanism it offers a haunting and haunted meta-reflection on exile and its experiences. Here at last is the affirmative secular response to the challenges of a post 9/11 present, where, as Lezra so effectively argues, only wounded sovereignty, weak concepts, unbounded events and defective social universals might save us." -- -Diane Rubenstein Cornell University "An urgently contemporary study of the relation between 'terror' as a state of expectancy in relation to an event to come, and 'terrorism' as the deadly deployment of force in situations of radical exploitation and oppression." -- -Julia Lupton University of California, Irvine "Lezra sketches a fascinating trip from the archaic scene of Oedipus, beyond the time of the founding of the individual and collective subject, to the events of September 11, at the threshold of our contingent future. Wild Materialism's path leads through the Paris of the 15th century, the Spanish empire, the war in Algeria, and on to the contemporary world, and delivers an analysis of the production of universals in and of political space, that prior instant from which dualisms and differences flow--inside/out, frien/enemy, private/public, terror/terrorism--divisions and reconstitutions of what is held in common. This is a work that refuses finally to dissolve politics into aesthetics, and seeks out an innovative, apt vocabulary for the tasks of ethics and politics, far from the fiction of sovereign, constituting power. Wild Materialism revises the sense of radical republicanism, basing itself in a fascinating interpretation of Levinas, Althusser and Freud, which forces us to rethink the classic arguments of the 20th century, from Arendt to Schmitt, from Koselleck to Habermas, Derrida to Negri." -- -Jose Luis Villacanas Universidad Complutense de Madrid
ISBN: 9780823232369
Dimensions: unknown
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400 pages