Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in
Counterpoint, by William V. Spanos, explores the affiliative
relationship between Arendt's and Said's thought, not simply their
mutual emphasis ...on the importance of the exilic consciousness in an
age characterized by the decline of the nation-state and the rise
of globalization, but also on the oppositional politics that a
displaced consciousness enables. The pairing of these two
extraordinary intellectuals is unusual and controversial because of
their ethnic identities. In radically secularizing their
comportment towards being, their exilic condition enabled them to
undertake inaugural critiques of the culture of the nation-state
system of Western modernity. As variations on the theme of exile,
the five chapters of this book constitute reflections on what is
foundational and abiding in both Arendt's and Said's work. They not
only document the heretofore unnoticed affiliation between the two
thinkers. They also shed light on Arendt's and Said's proleptic
activist explorations of the urgent "question of Palestine,"
especially on the fraught present situation, which bears increasing
witness to the irony that the Israeli nation-state's "solution"
has, from the beginning, systematically repeated the degradations
the Jewish people suffered at the hands of German nationalism.
Countering the representation of the end of the Cold War as the end of History, this essay argues for the urgent need to think the positive, anti-imperialist, possibilities for thought and practice ...of the Heideggerian "Nothing" that, in different forms, haunts liberal capitalist democracy.
In his book The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism, William V. Spanos critiqued the traditional Western concept of humanism, arguing that its origins are to be found not in ancient Greece's love ...of truth and wisdom, but in the Roman imperial era, when those Greek values were adapted in the service of imperialism on a deeply rooted, metaphysical level. Returning to that question of humanism in the context of the United States' war on terror in the post-9/11 era, Toward a Non-humanist Humanism points out the dehumanizing dynamics of Western modernity in which the rule of law is increasingly made flexible to defend against threats both real and potential. Spanos considers and assesses the work of thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek as humanistic reformers and concludes with an effort to imagine a different kind of humanism—a non- humanist humanism—in which the old binary of friend versus foe gives way to a coming community without ethnic, cultural, or sexual divisions.
<!CDATAInspired by the foreign policy entanglements of recent years, William V. Spanos offers a dramatic interpretation of Twain's classic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, offering a ...heretofore unexplored assessment of American exceptionalism and the place of a global America in the American imaginary. Spanos insists that Twain identifies with his protagonist, particularly in his defining use of the spectacle, and thus with an American exceptionalism that uncannily anticipates the George W. Bush administration's normalization of the state of exception and the imperial policy of preemptive war, unilateral regime change, and shock and awe tactics. Equally stimulating is Spanos's thoroughly original ontology of American exceptionalism and imperialism and his tracing of these forces through a chronological examination of Twain studies and criticism over the past century.
As an examination of an overlooked text and a critical history of American studies from its origins in the nation-oriented Myth and Symbol school of the Cold War era into its present globalizing or transnationalizing perspective, Shock and Awe will appeal to a broad audience of American literature scholars and beyond.>
It is therefore, a great virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transient things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. ...The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.
Spanos shares his thoughts on the secular. As anyone familiar with his scholarship and criticism is aware, the idea of the secular has been, increasingly, its supreme theme from virtually the ...beginning. The secular as such, devoid of its antithesis, tends, in its appeal to the laws of nature, to reproduce the world in the teleological image of the orderly Creation: the world in this secular dispensation, as Max Weber made decisively clear, becomes the object of mastery and the calling of human beings--their vocation--the rationalization of the earth according to the imperial dictates of the "capitalist spirit."
Spanos discusses the contents of his book The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism and posits what he continues to think is not only valid about his initial understanding of the idea of humanism ...but, because it remains inadequately thought, in need of further thinking: that humanism is not simply a worldly/ historical, but also and at bottom an ontological phenomenon, that is, a way of representing (the "truth" of) being at large. He then suggests that the modern University had its origins in the disciplining of being in the age of the Enlightenment. He also shows that the poststructuralists de-centering of Man constituted a revolution that was immediately betrayed by their failure to perceive the ontological de-centering of Man as a de-centering that also occurred at the more "worldly" sites on the continuum of being.
Bill Spanos in Conversation MCCANCE, DAWNE; Spanos, William; Kroetsch, Robert
Mosaic (Winnipeg),
03/2017, Letnik:
50, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
WS Well, one of the reasons why I decided to teach this course is precisely because the concept of globalization is being determined by the discourse of America, the discourse of liberal democratic ...capitalism, the discourse of the free market, and so forth. If we do not address this nihilistic momentum, we can talk about NAFTA, of GATT, of WTO, we can talk about the deadly consequences of "America.com" all we want, but we're not going to solve the problem, avoid the danger that "America.com" is, the danger that threatens the world, that threatens humankind, that threatens Being.
William V. Spanos’s chapter “Vietnam and the Pax Americana: A Genealogy of the ‘New World Order’” was originally published in his book-length study entitled America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire ...(1999) and is here reprinted, courtesy of the University of Minnesota Press. Spanos’s prescient, unrelenting, and wide-ranging analysis of the consequences of the Vietnam War argues that the contemporary moment—including the Gulf War, Operation Hope in Somalia, American interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, for example—has its “provenance” in the Vietnam War, yet the Vietnam War has essentially been underanalyzed and forgotten under the anesthetic of the American amnesiac condition, which perpetuates, systematically, an interpretation and misrepresentation of American exceptionalism and imperialism. Spanos’s philosophically informed interpretation of Vietnam Era literature, as well as other mediated representations of war, suggests that the Derridean specter haunts the “triumphalist” American representation of the post–Cold War reality, the New World Order or “Pax Americana,” and that the various politically correct theories that predict the decline of the nation-state or that celebrate the rise of American multicultural democracy will have mostly been the blind leading the blind toward a misapprehension of the global phenomenon of American hegemony.
The American critic William V. Spanos, a pioneer of postmodern theory and co-founder of one of its principal organs, the journalboundary 2, is, in the words ofA William V. Spanos Readercoeditor ...Daniel T. O'Hara, everything that current post-modern theory is accused of not being: polemical, engaged, prophetic, passionate. Informed by his experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Spanos saw dire con-sequences for life in modernist aesthetic experiments, and he thereafter imbued his work with a constructive aspect ever in the name of more life.A William V. Spanos Readercollects Spanos's most important critical essays, providing both an introduc-tion to his prophetic, visionary work and a provocation to the practice of humanistic criticism.
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