Politics and the Passions, 1500-1850

Politics and the Passions, 1500-1850

Author: Victoria Kahn

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-01-10

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1400827159

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Focusing on the new theories of human motivation that emerged during the transition from feudalism to the modern period, this is the first book of new essays on the relationship between politics and the passions from Machiavelli to Bentham. Contributors address the crisis of moral and philosophical discourse in the early modern period; the necessity of inventing a new way of describing the relation between reflection and action, and private and public selves; the disciplinary regulation of the body; and the ideological constitution of identity. The collection as a whole asks whether a discourse of the passions might provide a critical perspective on the politics of subjectivity. Whatever their specific approach to the question of ideology, all the essays reconsider the legacy of the passions in modern political theory and the importance of the history of politics and the passions for modern political debates. Contributors, in addition to the editors, are Nancy Armstrong, Judith Butler, Riccardo Caporali, Howard Caygill, Patrick Coleman, Frances Ferguson, John Guillory, Timothy Hampton, John P. McCormick, and Leonard Tennenhouse.


Secular Assemblages

Secular Assemblages

Author: Marek Sullivan

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-01-09

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1350123684

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In this book, Marek Sullivan challenges a widespread consensus linking secularization to rationalization, and argues for a more sensual genealogy of secularity connected to affect, race and power. While existing works of secular intellectual history, especially Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007), tend to rely on rationalistic conceptions of Enlightenment thought, Sullivan offers an alternative perspective on key thinkers such as Descartes, Montesquieu and Diderot, asserting that these figures sought to reinstate emotion against the rationalistic tendencies of the past. From Descartes's last work Les Passions de l'Âme (1649) to Baron d'Holbach's System of Nature (1770), the French Enlightenment demonstrated an acute understanding of the limits of reason, with crucial implications for our current 'postsecular' and 'postliberal' moment. Sullivan also emphasizes the importance of Western constructions of Oriental religions for the history of the secular, identifying a distinctively secular-yet impassioned-form of Orientalism that emerged in the 18th century. Mahomet's racial profile in Voltaire's Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet (1741), for example, functioned as a polemic device calibrated for emotional impact, in line with Enlightenment efforts to generate an affective body of anti-Catholic propaganda that simultaneously shored up people's sense of national belonging. By exposing the Enlightenment as a nationalistic and affective movement that resorted to racist, Orientalist and emotional tropes from the outset, Sullivan ultimately undermines modern nationalist appeals to the Enlightenment as a mark of European distinction.


The Biopolitics of Development

The Biopolitics of Development

Author: Sandro Mezzadra

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-12-27

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 8132215966

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This book offers an original analysis and theorization of the biopolitics of development in the postcolonial present, and draws significantly from the later works of Michel Foucault on biopolitics. Foucault’s works have had a massive influence on postcolonial literatures, particularly in political science and international relations, and several authors of this book have themselves made significant contributions to that influence. While Foucault’s thought has been inspirational for understanding colonial biopolitics as well as governmental rationalities concerned with development, his works have too often failed to inspire studies of political subjectivity. Instead, they have been used to stoke the myth of the inevitability of the decline of collective political subjects, often describing an increasingly limited horizon of political possibilities, and provoking a disenchantment with the political itself in postcolonial works and studies. Working against the grain of current Foucauldian scholarship, this book underlines the importance of Foucault’s work for the capacity to recognize how this degraded view of political subjectivity came about, particularly within the framework of the discourses and politics of ‘development’, and with particular attention to the predicaments of postcolonial peoples. It explores how we can use Foucault’s ideas to recover the vital capacity to think and act politically at a time when fundamentally human capacities to think, know and to act purposively in the world are being pathologized as expressions of the hubris and ‘underdevelopment’ of postcolonial peoples. Why and how it is that life in postcolonial settings has been depoliticized to such dramatic effect? The immediacy of these themes will be obvious to anyone living in the South of the world. But within the academy they remain heavily under-addressed. In thinking about what it means to read Michel Foucault today, this book tackles some significant questions and problems: Not simply that of how to explain the ways in which postcolonial regimes of governance have achieved the debasements of political subjectivity they have; nor that of how we might better equip them with the means to suborn the life of postcolonial peoples more fully; but that of how such peoples, in their subjection to governance, can and do resist, subvert, escape and defy the imposition of modes of governance which seek to remove their lives of those very capacities for resistance, subversion, flight, and defiance.


Philosophies of Gratitude

Philosophies of Gratitude

Author: Ashraf H. A. Rushdy

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-10-28

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 019752687X

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In Philosophies of Gratitude, Ashraf H. A. Rushdy explores gratitude as a philosophical concept. The first half of the book traces its significance in fundamental Western moral philosophy and notions of ethics, specifically examining key historical moments and figures in classical antiquity, the early modern era, and the Enlightenment. In the second half of the book, Rushdy focuses on contemporary meanings of gratitude as a sentiment, action, and disposition: how we feel grateful, act grateful, and cultivate grateful being. He identifies these three forms of gratitude to discern various roles our emotions play in our ethical responses to the world around us. Rushdy then discusses how ingratitude, instead of indicating a moral failure, can also act as an important principle and ethical stand against injustice. Rushdy asserts that if we practice gratitude as a moral recognition of the other, then that gratitude varies alongside the different kinds of benefactors who receive it, ranging from the person who provides an expected service or gift, to the divine or natural sources whom we may credit with our very existence. By arguing for the necessity of analyzing gratitude as a philosophical concept, Rushdy reminds us of our capacity and appreciation for gratitude simply as an acknowledgment and acceptance of our humble dependency on and connectedness with our families, friends, communities, environments, and universe.


Biopolitics of Security

Biopolitics of Security

Author: Michael Dillon

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-02-11

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1317532686

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Taking its inspiration from Michel Foucault, this volume of essays integrates the analysis of security into the study of modern political and cultural theory. Explaining how both politics and security are differently problematised by changing accounts of time, the work shows how, during the course of the 17th century, the problematisation of government and rule became newly enframed by a novel account of time and human finitude, which it calls ‘factical finitude’. The correlate of factical finitude is the infinite, and the book explains how the problematisation of politics and security became that of securing the infinite government of finite things. It then explains how concrete political form was given to factical finitude by a combination of geopolitics and biopolitics. Modern sovereignty required the services of biopolitics from the very beginning. The essays explain how these politics of security arose at the same time, changed together, and have remained closely allied ever since. In particular, the book explains how biopolitics of security changed in response to the molecularisation and digitalisation of Life, and demonstrates how this has given rise to the dangers and contradictions of 21st century security politics. This book will be of much interest to students of political and cultural theory, critical security studies and International Relations.


Compassion's Edge

Compassion's Edge

Author: Katherine Ibbett

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0812249704

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Compassion's Edge traces the relation between compassion and toleration after France's Wars of Religion. This is not, however, a story about compassion overcoming difference but one of compassion reinforcing division. It provides a robust corrective to today's hope that fellow-feeling draws us inexorably and usefully together.


Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice

Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice

Author: Stephen Ahern

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-12-31

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 3319972685

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Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice develops new approaches to reading literature that are informed by the insights of scholars working in affect studies across many disciplines, with essays that consider works of fiction, drama, poetry and memoir ranging from the medieval to the postmodern. While building readings of representative texts, contributors reflect on the value of affect theory to literary critical practice, asking: what explanatory power is affect theory affording me here as a critic? what can the insights of the theory help me do with a text? Contributors work to incorporate lines of theory not always read together, accounting for the affective intensities that circulate through texts and readers and tracing the operations of affectively charged social scripts. Drawing variously on queer, feminist and critical race theory and informed by ecocritical and new materialist sensibilities, essays in the volume share a critical practice founded in an ethics of relation and contribute to an emerging postcritical moment.


Virtual Victorians

Virtual Victorians

Author: Veronica Alfano

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-01-18

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 1137393297

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Exploring how scholars use digital resources to reconstruct the 19th century, this volume probes key issues in the intersection of digital humanities and history. Part I examines the potential of online research tools for literary scholarship while Part II outlines a prehistory of digital virtuality by exploring specific Victorian cultural forms.


Moral Concepts and their History

Moral Concepts and their History

Author: Edward Skidelsky

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-19

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1000529274

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This edited volume is devoted to the history of moral concepts, including shame, contempt, happiness, conscience, cleanliness and 'the brick'. The chapters in this book are written from the diverse perspectives of the philosopher, theologian, linguist and historian of ideas. However, they are united in the conviction that these concepts are illuminated by being treated historically; or even, more strongly, that we cannot fully understand what they are now without knowing the history of how they have come to be. Viewed in this way, the history of moral concepts is a crucial preliminary to moral self-understanding, as well as an interesting enquiry in its own right. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the History of European Ideas.