Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture)
A brilliant and conceptually rich analysis of the influence of rage on the development of Western culture. Tracing rage from its earliest Greek articulation as Thymos in theIliad, Sloterdijk (Critique of Cynical Reason) argues for a notion of rage both as a motivating force in man's struggle for reward and recognition and as a foundational feature of the human understanding of time. According to the author, modernity has downplayed the primacy of rage in favor of a Freudian focus on desire as more fundamental to psychic life. These claims provide the framework for a demonstration of how rage has operated in the development of the psychopolitical history of the West, a history characterized by various attempts to save and invest rage, utilizing its force to further particular ideological ends, primarily religious and revolutionary. Though frequently hampered by excessive academic jargon and a theoretically questionable oscillation between the non-equivalent notions of Thymos and rage, the book offers a fascinating account of the historical dynamics of social development, one capable of holding a vast array of phenomena, from Biblical psalms to the 2005 Paris riots, within its purview.(May)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.