1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910459105303321

Autore

Fradinger Moira

Titolo

Binding violence [[electronic resource] ] : literary visions of political origins / / Moira Fradinger

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Stanford, Calif., : Stanford University Press, c2010

ISBN

0-8047-7465-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (347 p.)

Disciplina

809/.933552

Soggetti

Violence in literature

Politics in literature

Politics and literature

Comparative literature

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Literature, Violence, and Politics -- Antigone and the Polis -- The Most Modern of Tragedies: The Politics of Burial -- Creon’s Edict: The Barbarians at Home -- Dying Democratically: Antigone’s Ritual -- Modern Tempo— Democratic Overture, State Finale -- Sade’s Text and Sade’s Times -- The Libertine Alliance: No Ordinary Pact in Times of War -- Necrophiliac Cannibals: Dismembering “Nonpeople,” Membering “The People” -- Domestic Consistency: Not Laws, but Order -- Frame within the Frame: Riveting Voices and Gazes -- Modern Sovereignty: Perversion of Democracy? -- Vargas Llosa’s Appeal to History: Within and Beyond Latin America -- Necropolitics I: From an “African Horde” to a Modern Country -- Necropolitics II: Rebonding the Nation -- The Force of Imagination -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Binding Violence exposes the relation between literary imagination, autonomous politics, and violence through the close analysis of literary texts—in particular Sophocles' Antigone, D. A. F. de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, and Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat—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—violence—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.