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Fables of Responsibility
$18.10
Book
This book offers an analysis of the ways a linked set of ethico-politcal concepts – responsibility, rights, freedom, equality, and justice – might be re-thought, not simply jettisoned or reactively defended, in view of the linguistic deconstruction of their underlying principle, the individual human subject. In a series of reading of contemporary thinkers (notably Foucault and Derrida) and their philosophical actecedents (Marx, Nietzsche, Sade), the author argues that an encounter with the difficulties of reading (literary) language, precisely what resists the immediate comprehension or mastery of a subject, enables in turn a new thought of rights and responsibility.
What literature reaches us about politics is that the absence of foundations, whether in the world or in the subject, far from being its downfall, is its very condition of possibility because a foundation or a final resolution is lacking, we have politics and ethics and their predicaments. Like the reading of a text, which is never quite done, any responsibility worthy of the name cannot rest in the good conscience of its certain accomplishment, likewise, the assertion of rights can never be circumscribed or guaranteed – hence the ongoing necessity of the ethical and the political.
The book is driven by a sense that literary and theoretical questions, and the ideas or concepts they appeal to or provoke, play a critical role in the way we think about and experience politics, but that literary critics and theorists do far too little to understand those links or make them matter outside a very restricted sphere. The author seeks to harness this specialized discourse in order to consider what ethical and political thinking might learn from literature and its theorist; from the difficult burdens that literature places on its readers and the unusual transformations it can enact in our language, the very medium o four shared like.
Originally published in 1997. Thomas Keenan is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University. He is the editor of The End(s) of the Museum and the co-editor of Paul de Man’s, Wartime Journalism, 1939-1943 and Responses: On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism.
This is a reproduction edition from a scanned copy of the original work.
Title Fables of responsibility: aberrations and predicaments in ethics and politics
Author Thomas Keenan
Publisher Stanford University Press, 1997
ISBN 0804728267, 9780804728263
Length 251 pages
Contents
Literature and Democracy 1
RHETORIC 88
The Point Is to Exchange 99
No Mans Land Ideology 175
Notes 193
Index 245
Social Aims in a Changing World
$15.25
Book
This book is a carefully considered attempt to picture the changing social life and to reveal and to emphasize the basic purposes or aims which should guide community and social action. The author holds that the recreation of oneness of community life in spirit and in essence involves a change of emphasis from individual privilege to personal obligation -- that the issue is ultimately moral. It is in part the nature of this obligation that he seeks here to establish.
Professor Beach has given us an indictment of the machine age as it has thus far developed, and of the so-called "triumph of the individual." No critic of the machine per se, he flays the purely selfish ends to which our machine-released energies have been directed. No idol smashing destructionist, he makes cogent suggestions for the building of a modern social order, based on mutual understanding and helpfulness, and making use of our present superlative existing and potential resources of knowledge. According to Beach, today's world has lost the excuse of ignorance with respect to such problems as sickness, immigrant maladjustment, child labor, and war. The tools are at hand with which to eliminate almost every social ill to which the world is heir. The ends of living, both individual and community, must be made to conform to a larger and more intelligently pattern ideal.
This is a reproduction edition from a scanned copy of the following original edition:
Title Beach
Author Social Aims in a Changing World
Publisher Stanford University Press
ISBN 0804701512, 9780804701518
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