Binding violence
Subtitle: literary visions of political origins
By: Moira Fradinger.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 333
ISBN-13: 9780804763301
Subjects: Violence in literature; Politics in literature; Politics and literature; Comparative literature
Description: From the publisher. Binding Violence exposes the relation between literary imagination, autonomous politics, and violence through the close analysis of literary texts{u2014}in particular Sophocles' Antigone, D.A.F. de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, and Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat{u2014}that speak to a blind spot in democratic theory, namely, how we decide democratically on the borders of our political communities. These works bear the imprint of the anxieties of democracy concerning its other{u2014}violence{u2014}especially when the question of a redefinition of membership is at stake. The book shares the philosophical interest in rethinking politics that has recently surfaced at the crossroads of literary criticism, philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. Fradinger takes seriously the responsibility to think through and give names to the political uses of violence and to provoke useful reflection on the problem of violence as it relates to politics and on literature as it relates to its times.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Sophocles's Antigone or the invention of politics : we the city; title: D.A.F. de Sade's One hundred and twenty days of Sodom or the re-invention of politics : we the people; title: Mario Vargas Llosa's The feast of the goat or sovereign politics : we the nation-state.