Platonic noise Euben, J. Peter
2003., 20090110, 2009, 2003, 2003-01-01
eBook
Platonic Noise brings classical and contemporary writings into conversation to enrich our experience of modern life and politics. Drawing on writers as diverse as Plato, Homer, Nietzsche, Borges, Don ...DeLillo, and Philip Roth, Peter Euben shows us the relevance of both popular literature and ancient Greek thought to current questions of loss, mourning, and democracy -- all while arguing for the redeeming qualities of political and intellectual work and making an original case against presentism. Juxtaposing ancient and contemporary texts, politics, and culture, Euben reflects on a remarkable range of recent issues and controversies. He discusses Stoic cosmopolitanism and globalization, takes a critical look at Nietzsche's own efforts to make the Greeks speak to the issues of his day, examines a Greek tragedy through Hannah Arendt's eyes, compares the role of comedy in ancient Athens and contemporary America, analyzes political theory as a reaction to an acute sense of loss, and considers questions of agency and morality. Platonic Noise makes a case for reading political theory and politics through literature. Working as much through example as through explicit argument, Euben casts the literary memory of Athenian democracy as a crucial cultural resource and a presence in contemporary political and theoretical debates. In so doing, he reasserts the moral value of what we used to call participatory democracy and the practical value of seeing ourselves with the help of insights from long-gone Greeks.
Roland Végs? opens up a new debate in favour of abandoning the very idea of the world in both philosophy and politics. Opening with a reconsideration of the Heideggerian critique of worldlessness, he ...traces the overlooked history of worldlessness in Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou.
In this book Roberto Esposito explores the conceptual trajectories of two of the twentieth century’s most vital thinkers of the political: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. Taking Homer’s Iliad—that ...“great prism through which every gesture has the possibility of becoming public, precisely by being observed by others”— as the common origin and point of departure for our understanding of Western philosophical and political traditions, Esposito examines the foundational relation between war and the political.
Drawing actively and extensively on Arendt’s and Weil’s voluminous writings, but also sparring with thinkers from Marx to Heidegger, The Origin of the Political traverses the relation between polemos and polis, between Greece, Rome, God, force, technicity, evil, and the extension of the Christian imperial tradition, while at the same time delineating the conceptual and hermeneutic ground for the development of Esposito’s notion and practice of “the impolitical.”
In Esposito’s account Arendt and Weil emerge “in the inverse of the other’s thought, in the shadow of the other’s light,” to “think what the thought of the other excludes not as something that is foreign, but rather as something that appears unthinkable and, for that very reason, remains to be thought.” Moving slowly toward their conceptualizations of love and heroism, Esposito unravels the West’s illusory metaphysical dream of peace, obliging us to reevaluate ceaselessly what it means to be responsible in the wake of past and contemporary forms of war.
Comparing the liberal Jewish ethics of the German-Jewish philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt, this book argues that both espoused a diasporic, worldly conception of Jewish identity that was ...anchored in a pluralist and politically engaged interpretation of Jewish history and an abiding interest in the complex lived reality of modern Jews. Arendt's indebtedness to liberal Jewish thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn, Abraham Geiger, Hermann Cohen, and Ernst Cassirer has been obscured by her modernist posture and caustic critique of the assimilationism of her German-Jewish forebears. By reorienting our conception of Arendt as a profoundly secular thinker anchored in twentieth century political debates, we are led to rethink the philosophical, political, and ethical legacy of liberal Jewish discourse.
How can we reinvigorate the human capacity for political judgement in our uncertain post-foundational world? This book takes up the challenge by calling on 20th-century existentialism, in particular ...the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt.
Explores Arendt's understanding of method: of what political theory is, its purposes and limits, and how it is best undertaken. It shows that her unusual approach - which has led some to believe she ...fails to offer a consistent method - reflects a definite conception of and approach to political theory.
If politics is about how we perceive and relate to the world, then how the world is constructed, disclosed and disrupted are matters of politics. By exploring the force of aesthetic experience and ...the role of space, Mustafa Dikeç offers an understanding of politics based on apprehension and revelation. Dikeç's theory rests on a particular relationship between space and politics. Here, space is not the background for relations between things; rather, space implies a capacity for things to appear and exhibit relations of simultaneity and order. Space is a form of appearance and a mode of actuality, and its disruption is the sublime element in politics.
