Theory’s Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy
Autor Zahi Zallouaen Limba Engleză Hardback – 14 oct 2018
Engaging scholars from across humanistic fields grappling with the role and value of theory in our times, Theory's Autoimmunity argues for reclaiming theory's skepticism as a value. To cultivate theory's skeptical impulses is to embrace what Jacques Derrida has termed autoimmunity: a condition of openness to the outside—openness of the self, the community, democracy, or other ideals—that allows for change.
Openness to change comes with risks, and the self-protective temptation to immunize oneself or one's community against these risks is strong. Yet without such risks, without openness to otherness, no encounter with the new, with difference, can ever take place. Without autoimmunity, theory becomes stagnant and programmatic, unable to receive and respond to the other or the event, to address, revise, and produce new meanings.
Taking up the challenge of thinking theory as skepticism, with and against philosophy, this study turns to literature as an interlocutor, investigating the ways theory, like the literary works of Montaigne, Baudelaire, Stendhal, Morrison, or Duras, declines to put on the interpretive brakes, to stop reading at a point of understanding. Undoing and remaking itself, theory—those critical interpretive practices that revel in the creation and proliferation of meaning—becomes autoimmune.
Openness to change comes with risks, and the self-protective temptation to immunize oneself or one's community against these risks is strong. Yet without such risks, without openness to otherness, no encounter with the new, with difference, can ever take place. Without autoimmunity, theory becomes stagnant and programmatic, unable to receive and respond to the other or the event, to address, revise, and produce new meanings.
Taking up the challenge of thinking theory as skepticism, with and against philosophy, this study turns to literature as an interlocutor, investigating the ways theory, like the literary works of Montaigne, Baudelaire, Stendhal, Morrison, or Duras, declines to put on the interpretive brakes, to stop reading at a point of understanding. Undoing and remaking itself, theory—those critical interpretive practices that revel in the creation and proliferation of meaning—becomes autoimmune.
Preț: 696.69 lei
Preț vechi: 849.62 lei
-18% Nou
Puncte Express: 1045
Preț estimativ în valută:
133.33€ • 138.02$ • 112.69£
133.33€ • 138.02$ • 112.69£
Carte indisponibilă temporar
Doresc să fiu notificat când acest titlu va fi disponibil:
Se trimite...
Preluare comenzi: 021 569.72.76
Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780810137790
ISBN-10: 0810137798
Pagini: 240
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.48 kg
Editura: Northwestern University Press
Colecția Northwestern University Press
ISBN-10: 0810137798
Pagini: 240
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.48 kg
Editura: Northwestern University Press
Colecția Northwestern University Press
Notă biografică
ZAHI ZALLOUA is the Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and a professor of French and Interdisciplinary Studies at Whitman College. He is the author of Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question, Reading Unruly: Interpretation and Its Ethical Demands, and Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism.
Cuprins
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Toward a Hermeneutics of Skepticism
Chapter 1: Montaignian Meditations
Chapter 2: Ideology, Critique, and the Event of Literature
Chapter 3: Irony, Power, and the Death Drive
Chapter 4: Queering Difference, or the Feminine Logic of the “Non-all”
Chapter 5: Immunizing Ontology: The Speculative Turn
Conclusion: Desire of the Theorist
Works Cited
Notes
Introduction: Toward a Hermeneutics of Skepticism
Chapter 1: Montaignian Meditations
Chapter 2: Ideology, Critique, and the Event of Literature
Chapter 3: Irony, Power, and the Death Drive
Chapter 4: Queering Difference, or the Feminine Logic of the “Non-all”
Chapter 5: Immunizing Ontology: The Speculative Turn
Conclusion: Desire of the Theorist
Works Cited
Notes
Descriere
Zahi Zalloua’s Theory's Autoimmunity is a multidisciplinary work of philosophy and critical theory that argues for reclaiming theory's skepticism as a value.