Adam John Waterman
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780823298761
- eISBN:
- 9781531500597
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823298761.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
The Corpse in the Kitchen explores relationships between the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the enclosure of Indigenous land and extraction of Indigenous resources, and settler colonialism as a ...
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The Corpse in the Kitchen explores relationships between the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the enclosure of Indigenous land and extraction of Indigenous resources, and settler colonialism as a technique of racial capitalism. Drawing upon the literature and historiography of the so-called Black Hawk War, it looks to the colonization of the upper Mississippi River lead region as one instance of primitive accumulation for purposes of mineral accretion. While conventional histories of the Black Hawk War have treated the conflict as gratuitous and tragic, The Corpse in the Kitchen argues that the conflict between Black Hawk, settler militias, and the federal military were part of a struggle over the dispensation of mineral resources, specifically, mineral lead. The elemental basis for the fabrication of bullets, the federal state had a vested interest in control over regional lead resources, as a means of manufacturing the implements by which it would secure its sovereignty over North America. As the basis for metallic type, the abundance of lead drawn from the mines of the upper Mississippi would also occasion an expansion of printing, creating new technologies of memory and forgetting. The Corpse in the Kitchen explores the intimacies between extraction and killing, writing, printing, memory, and forgetting, a story of settlers as rapacious consumers of Indigenous peoples.Less
The Corpse in the Kitchen explores relationships between the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the enclosure of Indigenous land and extraction of Indigenous resources, and settler colonialism as a technique of racial capitalism. Drawing upon the literature and historiography of the so-called Black Hawk War, it looks to the colonization of the upper Mississippi River lead region as one instance of primitive accumulation for purposes of mineral accretion. While conventional histories of the Black Hawk War have treated the conflict as gratuitous and tragic, The Corpse in the Kitchen argues that the conflict between Black Hawk, settler militias, and the federal military were part of a struggle over the dispensation of mineral resources, specifically, mineral lead. The elemental basis for the fabrication of bullets, the federal state had a vested interest in control over regional lead resources, as a means of manufacturing the implements by which it would secure its sovereignty over North America. As the basis for metallic type, the abundance of lead drawn from the mines of the upper Mississippi would also occasion an expansion of printing, creating new technologies of memory and forgetting. The Corpse in the Kitchen explores the intimacies between extraction and killing, writing, printing, memory, and forgetting, a story of settlers as rapacious consumers of Indigenous peoples.
Travis E. Ables
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780823297993
- eISBN:
- 9781531500580
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823297993.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
The Body of the Cross is a study of holy victims in Western Christian history, and how their deaths led to the idea of the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice. Since its first centuries, ...
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The Body of the Cross is a study of holy victims in Western Christian history, and how their deaths led to the idea of the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice. Since its first centuries, Christianity has traded on the suffering of victims who were substitutes for the Christian social body. They secured holiness for the church by their own sacred power, or by their reprobation and rejection. Martyrs, mystics, and heretics suffered and died for the community, which expressed the power of their tortured flesh in eucharistic, social, and christological forms. Jesus Christ was one of those holy substitutes, but it was late in Western history that his body took on the status of the exemplary victim. This book traces that story, giving special attention to popular spirituality, religious dissent, and the writing of women. It examines how the symbol of the cross functioned in key moments in this history, including the parting of the ways of Judaism and Christianity, the gnostic debates, martyr traditions, and medieval mysticism and heresy. In a Reformation era haunted by divine wrath, these themes concentrated in a new idea: Jesus Christ died on the cross to absorb divine punishment for sin, a holy body and a rejected body in one.Less
The Body of the Cross is a study of holy victims in Western Christian history, and how their deaths led to the idea of the cross as a substitutionary sacrifice. Since its first centuries, Christianity has traded on the suffering of victims who were substitutes for the Christian social body. They secured holiness for the church by their own sacred power, or by their reprobation and rejection. Martyrs, mystics, and heretics suffered and died for the community, which expressed the power of their tortured flesh in eucharistic, social, and christological forms. Jesus Christ was one of those holy substitutes, but it was late in Western history that his body took on the status of the exemplary victim. This book traces that story, giving special attention to popular spirituality, religious dissent, and the writing of women. It examines how the symbol of the cross functioned in key moments in this history, including the parting of the ways of Judaism and Christianity, the gnostic debates, martyr traditions, and medieval mysticism and heresy. In a Reformation era haunted by divine wrath, these themes concentrated in a new idea: Jesus Christ died on the cross to absorb divine punishment for sin, a holy body and a rejected body in one.
Adam H. Domby and Simon Lewis (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780823298150
- eISBN:
- 9781531500559
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823298150.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, American History: Civil War
This book looks at various ways freedom was both gained and lost during Reconstruction. Its unifying theme is the expansion and contraction of the many and varied manifestations and meanings of ...
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This book looks at various ways freedom was both gained and lost during Reconstruction. Its unifying theme is the expansion and contraction of the many and varied manifestations and meanings of freedom. The central issue of the that shaped Reconstruction was freedom—but not always in the way we might expect. The essays explore the frequent “gaps” between legal and political gains supposedly secured in the statute books and people’s actual lived experience. Even after legal emancipation, formerly enslaved people faced a lack of economic freedom dependent on equal educational access and employment opportunity. Freedom was not just a question of being enslaved or not enslaved; nor was it just about access to the ballot. Freedom to be educated; freedom to testify in court; freedom from imprisonment; even economic opportunity was a form of freedom. The book takes an expansive approach to studying Reconstruction. This book reaches beyond just the American South, to consider Reconstruction’s impact on freedoms in border states, on northerners, in Brazil, and even in Australia. It also expands the traditional periodization beyond 1876, because Reconstruction—when seen as a series of conflicts in which freedoms were gained and lost—doesn’t end in 1876 but one might argue continues to this day. Approximately 150 years after this crucial period in American history—so often overlooked in popular memory—a group of scholars come together to demonstrate that struggles over the meaning of freedom not only defined Reconstruction but also continue to shape America to this day.Less
This book looks at various ways freedom was both gained and lost during Reconstruction. Its unifying theme is the expansion and contraction of the many and varied manifestations and meanings of freedom. The central issue of the that shaped Reconstruction was freedom—but not always in the way we might expect. The essays explore the frequent “gaps” between legal and political gains supposedly secured in the statute books and people’s actual lived experience. Even after legal emancipation, formerly enslaved people faced a lack of economic freedom dependent on equal educational access and employment opportunity. Freedom was not just a question of being enslaved or not enslaved; nor was it just about access to the ballot. Freedom to be educated; freedom to testify in court; freedom from imprisonment; even economic opportunity was a form of freedom. The book takes an expansive approach to studying Reconstruction. This book reaches beyond just the American South, to consider Reconstruction’s impact on freedoms in border states, on northerners, in Brazil, and even in Australia. It also expands the traditional periodization beyond 1876, because Reconstruction—when seen as a series of conflicts in which freedoms were gained and lost—doesn’t end in 1876 but one might argue continues to this day. Approximately 150 years after this crucial period in American history—so often overlooked in popular memory—a group of scholars come together to demonstrate that struggles over the meaning of freedom not only defined Reconstruction but also continue to shape America to this day.
Clayton Crockett and Catherine Keller (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780823298112
- eISBN:
- 9781531500573
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823298112.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Theology
This volume develops new resources around the topic of political theology. The discourse of political theology is here situated on an edge, that is, on the edge of a world that is grappling with ...
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This volume develops new resources around the topic of political theology. The discourse of political theology is here situated on an edge, that is, on the edge of a world that is grappling with global warming, a brutal form of neoliberal capitalism, protests against racism and police brutality, and the COVID-19 pandemic. This edge is also a form of eschatology that forces us to imagine new ways of being religious and political in our cohabitation of a fragile and shared world. The tradition of political theology is often associated with philosophical responses to the work of Carl Schmitt, along with critical attempts to disengage religion from his right-wing politics. The contributors to this volume are informed by Schmitt but not limited to his perspectives. They engage and transform political theology from the standpoint of climate change, the politics of race and Black Lives Matter, and non-Christian political theologies including Islam and Sikhism. This book includes world-renowned scholars and emerging voices that together open up the tradition of political theology to new ideas and new ways of thinking.Less
This volume develops new resources around the topic of political theology. The discourse of political theology is here situated on an edge, that is, on the edge of a world that is grappling with global warming, a brutal form of neoliberal capitalism, protests against racism and police brutality, and the COVID-19 pandemic. This edge is also a form of eschatology that forces us to imagine new ways of being religious and political in our cohabitation of a fragile and shared world. The tradition of political theology is often associated with philosophical responses to the work of Carl Schmitt, along with critical attempts to disengage religion from his right-wing politics. The contributors to this volume are informed by Schmitt but not limited to his perspectives. They engage and transform political theology from the standpoint of climate change, the politics of race and Black Lives Matter, and non-Christian political theologies including Islam and Sikhism. This book includes world-renowned scholars and emerging voices that together open up the tradition of political theology to new ideas and new ways of thinking.
Thomas Claviez and Viola Marchi (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780823298075
- eISBN:
- 9781531500603
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823298075.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
Since Greek tragedy and philosophy, ethics has—more or less successfully—served as a bulwark against contingency; or at least to provide guidance in cases were decisions had to be taken in the face ...
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Since Greek tragedy and philosophy, ethics has—more or less successfully—served as a bulwark against contingency; or at least to provide guidance in cases were decisions had to be taken in the face of the undecidable. The essays collected here tackle this problem against the background of an Enlightenment that has made the overcoming of contingency its raison d’être. However, contingency’s hardnosed existence subverts this success story. And it seems that Hegel’s dialectics—whose main goal it is to eliminate it—forms something like a last line of defence against it. Ranging from topics like community, environmental ethics, and agency to the goals of critical philosophy, the renowned scholars assembled in this volume show that it might be time to leave Hegel’s cosmological concept of reason behind.Less
Since Greek tragedy and philosophy, ethics has—more or less successfully—served as a bulwark against contingency; or at least to provide guidance in cases were decisions had to be taken in the face of the undecidable. The essays collected here tackle this problem against the background of an Enlightenment that has made the overcoming of contingency its raison d’être. However, contingency’s hardnosed existence subverts this success story. And it seems that Hegel’s dialectics—whose main goal it is to eliminate it—forms something like a last line of defence against it. Ranging from topics like community, environmental ethics, and agency to the goals of critical philosophy, the renowned scholars assembled in this volume show that it might be time to leave Hegel’s cosmological concept of reason behind.
Allan Punzalan Isaac
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780823298525
- eISBN:
- 9781531500542
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823298525.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
Filipino Time examines how a variety of immaterial labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines and around the world, while producing bodily and affective disciplines and dislocations, also ...
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Filipino Time examines how a variety of immaterial labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines and around the world, while producing bodily and affective disciplines and dislocations, also generate and explore vital affects, multiple networks, and other worlds. Whether in representations of death in a musical or keeping work time at bay in a call center, these forms of living emerge from and even work alongside capitalist exploitation of affective labor. Affective labor involves human intersubjective interaction and creative capacities. Thus, through creative labor, subjects make communal worlds out of one colonized by capital time. In reading these cultural productions, the book traces concurrent chronicities, ways of sensing and making sense of time alongside capital’s dominant narrative. From the hostile but habitable textures of labor-time, migratory subjects live and weave narratives of place and belonging, produce new modes of connections and ways to feel time with others.The book explores how these chronicities are re-articulated in a capacious archive of storytelling about the Filipino labor diaspora in fiction, in a musical, in an ethnography, and in a documentary film. Each of the genres demonstrates how time and space are manifest in deformations by narrative and genre. These cultural expressions capture life-making capacities within the capitalist world of disruptions and circulations of bodies and time. Thus, they index how selves go out of bounds beyond the economic contract to transform, even momentarily, self, others, time, and their surroundings.Less
Filipino Time examines how a variety of immaterial labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines and around the world, while producing bodily and affective disciplines and dislocations, also generate and explore vital affects, multiple networks, and other worlds. Whether in representations of death in a musical or keeping work time at bay in a call center, these forms of living emerge from and even work alongside capitalist exploitation of affective labor. Affective labor involves human intersubjective interaction and creative capacities. Thus, through creative labor, subjects make communal worlds out of one colonized by capital time. In reading these cultural productions, the book traces concurrent chronicities, ways of sensing and making sense of time alongside capital’s dominant narrative. From the hostile but habitable textures of labor-time, migratory subjects live and weave narratives of place and belonging, produce new modes of connections and ways to feel time with others.The book explores how these chronicities are re-articulated in a capacious archive of storytelling about the Filipino labor diaspora in fiction, in a musical, in an ethnography, and in a documentary film. Each of the genres demonstrates how time and space are manifest in deformations by narrative and genre. These cultural expressions capture life-making capacities within the capitalist world of disruptions and circulations of bodies and time. Thus, they index how selves go out of bounds beyond the economic contract to transform, even momentarily, self, others, time, and their surroundings.
Ina Merdjanova (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780823298600
- eISBN:
- 9781531500610
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823298600.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Religious Studies
This volume seeks to redress a gap in the study of Orthodox Christianity, which has largely remained gender blind. It engages women’s lifeworlds, practices, and experiences in relation to Orthodox ...
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This volume seeks to redress a gap in the study of Orthodox Christianity, which has largely remained gender blind. It engages women’s lifeworlds, practices, and experiences in relation to Orthodox Christianity in multiple, varied localities, discussing both contemporary and pre-1989 developments. The contributions in the volume critically engage the pluralist and changing character of Orthodox forms of institutional and social life in relation to gender by using feminist epistemologies and drawing on original ethnographic research to account for previously ignored themes, perspectives, knowledges, and experiences of women in Orthodox Christian contexts. The volume pushes out the understanding of Orthodox Christianity in new directions by looking at Orthodox women of diverse backgrounds in different settings: parishes, monasteries, the secular spaces of everyday life, and under shifting historical conditions and political regimes—and by offering new theoretical insights. The volume combines the depth of ethnographic analysis with geographical breadth. Employing various research approaches and methodologies, the contributions engage two major intertwined lines of analysis—continuity and transformation—in social practices, demographic trends, and larger material contexts at the intersection between gender, Orthodoxy, and locality. To be sure, continuity contains the seeds of change, and transformation emerges within seemingly rigid structures and practices, in defiance to claims—coming both from within and without Orthodox Christianity—that Orthodox Christianity is immutable and fixed in time.Less
This volume seeks to redress a gap in the study of Orthodox Christianity, which has largely remained gender blind. It engages women’s lifeworlds, practices, and experiences in relation to Orthodox Christianity in multiple, varied localities, discussing both contemporary and pre-1989 developments. The contributions in the volume critically engage the pluralist and changing character of Orthodox forms of institutional and social life in relation to gender by using feminist epistemologies and drawing on original ethnographic research to account for previously ignored themes, perspectives, knowledges, and experiences of women in Orthodox Christian contexts. The volume pushes out the understanding of Orthodox Christianity in new directions by looking at Orthodox women of diverse backgrounds in different settings: parishes, monasteries, the secular spaces of everyday life, and under shifting historical conditions and political regimes—and by offering new theoretical insights. The volume combines the depth of ethnographic analysis with geographical breadth. Employing various research approaches and methodologies, the contributions engage two major intertwined lines of analysis—continuity and transformation—in social practices, demographic trends, and larger material contexts at the intersection between gender, Orthodoxy, and locality. To be sure, continuity contains the seeds of change, and transformation emerges within seemingly rigid structures and practices, in defiance to claims—coming both from within and without Orthodox Christianity—that Orthodox Christianity is immutable and fixed in time.
Brandon L. Bayne
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- January 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780823294206
- eISBN:
- 9780823297474
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823294206.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, History of Christianity
In 1695, Father Antonio Menéndez, the Rector of the Mayo and Yaqui missions of Sonora, wrote to Father Eusebio Kino to assure him that the recent revolt of the O’odham and death of the missionary ...
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In 1695, Father Antonio Menéndez, the Rector of the Mayo and Yaqui missions of Sonora, wrote to Father Eusebio Kino to assure him that the recent revolt of the O’odham and death of the missionary Father Javier Saeta was not a tragedy, but a triumph. He optimistically reassured Kino, “It is a good sign, Father, that all those missions begin with the blood of a minister to cultivate it since it is an indication of their perseverance and good stability.” While the idea that successful missions needed Indigenous revolts and missionary deaths seems counterintuitive, this book illustrates how it became a central logic of frontier colonization in Spanish North America. Missions Begin with Blood argues that martyrdom acted as a ceremony of possession that helped Jesuits understand suffering, violence, disease, and death as ways that God inevitably worked to advance Christendom. When positioning themselves vis-à-vis rival religious orders, petitioning superiors for support, preparing campaigns to extirpate native “idolatries,” or protecting converts from European and Indigenous enemies, Jesuits believed that winning would come through their wounding and victories through victimization. This book correlates these tales of suffering to deep genealogies of redemptive death in Catholic discourse and explains how such traditions and practices worked to rationalize early modern colonialism. Specifically, it focuses on an agricultural metaphor that pervaded missionary discourse where Jesuits understood their lives and labors as seed, watered by the sweat of their suffering, tears of their exile, and blood of their sacrifice.Less
In 1695, Father Antonio Menéndez, the Rector of the Mayo and Yaqui missions of Sonora, wrote to Father Eusebio Kino to assure him that the recent revolt of the O’odham and death of the missionary Father Javier Saeta was not a tragedy, but a triumph. He optimistically reassured Kino, “It is a good sign, Father, that all those missions begin with the blood of a minister to cultivate it since it is an indication of their perseverance and good stability.” While the idea that successful missions needed Indigenous revolts and missionary deaths seems counterintuitive, this book illustrates how it became a central logic of frontier colonization in Spanish North America. Missions Begin with Blood argues that martyrdom acted as a ceremony of possession that helped Jesuits understand suffering, violence, disease, and death as ways that God inevitably worked to advance Christendom. When positioning themselves vis-à-vis rival religious orders, petitioning superiors for support, preparing campaigns to extirpate native “idolatries,” or protecting converts from European and Indigenous enemies, Jesuits believed that winning would come through their wounding and victories through victimization. This book correlates these tales of suffering to deep genealogies of redemptive death in Catholic discourse and explains how such traditions and practices worked to rationalize early modern colonialism. Specifically, it focuses on an agricultural metaphor that pervaded missionary discourse where Jesuits understood their lives and labors as seed, watered by the sweat of their suffering, tears of their exile, and blood of their sacrifice.
Michael Naas
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780823298396
- eISBN:
- 9781531500528
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823298396.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Language
Class Acts looks at two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida’s work as a philosopher, namely, his public presentations and his teaching, along with the question of the “speech act” that links ...
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Class Acts looks at two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida’s work as a philosopher, namely, his public presentations and his teaching, along with the question of the “speech act” that links them, that is, the question of what one is doing when one speaks in public in these ways. The work is divided into two parts, each of which follows Derrida’s itinerary with regard to speech act theory from the 1970s through the 1990s. Part I, titled “Derrida in Montreal,” analyzes Derrida’s critique of John Austin and his own subsequent redefinition of speech act theory over the course of three public lectures or events (in 1971, 1979, and 1997), all three, for reasons I try to identify and explain, in Montreal. Part II. “The Open Seminar,” begins with an overview of Derrida’s teaching career and his famous “seminar” presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. It then turns to the way Derrida interrogated and himself redeployed speech act theory in three recently published seminars (on life-death, theory and practice, and forgiveness). We ultimately come to see through this juxtaposition that, whether he was in a conference hall or a classroom, Derrida was always interested in the way in which spoken or written words might not just communicate some meaning or intent but give rise to something like an event. This is a book about the possibility of such events in Derrida’s work as a pedagogue and public intellectual.Less
Class Acts looks at two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida’s work as a philosopher, namely, his public presentations and his teaching, along with the question of the “speech act” that links them, that is, the question of what one is doing when one speaks in public in these ways. The work is divided into two parts, each of which follows Derrida’s itinerary with regard to speech act theory from the 1970s through the 1990s. Part I, titled “Derrida in Montreal,” analyzes Derrida’s critique of John Austin and his own subsequent redefinition of speech act theory over the course of three public lectures or events (in 1971, 1979, and 1997), all three, for reasons I try to identify and explain, in Montreal. Part II. “The Open Seminar,” begins with an overview of Derrida’s teaching career and his famous “seminar” presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. It then turns to the way Derrida interrogated and himself redeployed speech act theory in three recently published seminars (on life-death, theory and practice, and forgiveness). We ultimately come to see through this juxtaposition that, whether he was in a conference hall or a classroom, Derrida was always interested in the way in which spoken or written words might not just communicate some meaning or intent but give rise to something like an event. This is a book about the possibility of such events in Derrida’s work as a pedagogue and public intellectual.
Rosaura Martinez Ruiz
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9780823298273
- eISBN:
- 9781531500535
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823298273.001.0001
- Subject:
- Psychology, Social Psychology
This book considers a promise left unfulfilled in Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Principle of Pleasure. There Freud suggests that he will investigate a psychic tendency that is not subject to the ...
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This book considers a promise left unfulfilled in Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Principle of Pleasure. There Freud suggests that he will investigate a psychic tendency that is not subject to the pleasure principle, but in fact for Freud the latter remains sovereign. Following Jacques Derrida, Martínez argues that when the pleasure principle comes into contact with the death drive (a tendency toward aggression or cruelty), the psyche can take detours that, without exceeding the limit of the pleasure principle, can nevertheless defer it. Eros: Beyond the Death Drive reflects on these deviations of the pleasure principle, which Martínez finds both in the political sphere and in intimate relations. Following these erotic paths, Martínez argues that the forces of the death drive can only be resisted if resistance is understood as an ongoing process in which erotic action and the construction of pathways for sublimation are interminable tasks. We know that the final accomplishment of these tasks is impossible, but, like Freud’s “impossible professions,” they remain imperative. Though always incomplete, they remain undeniably urgent, and psychoanalysis and deconstruction remind us of their urgency. In complementary ways, both Freud and Derrida teach us that the death drive is insurmountable, but that through political action we can delay, defer, and postpone it. Martínez shows us that this effort of resistance must be uninterrupted. Calling for the creation and maintenance of a “community of mourning duelists,” this book builds toward the affirmation of the kind of “erotic battalion” that must always be mobilized.Less
This book considers a promise left unfulfilled in Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Principle of Pleasure. There Freud suggests that he will investigate a psychic tendency that is not subject to the pleasure principle, but in fact for Freud the latter remains sovereign. Following Jacques Derrida, Martínez argues that when the pleasure principle comes into contact with the death drive (a tendency toward aggression or cruelty), the psyche can take detours that, without exceeding the limit of the pleasure principle, can nevertheless defer it. Eros: Beyond the Death Drive reflects on these deviations of the pleasure principle, which Martínez finds both in the political sphere and in intimate relations. Following these erotic paths, Martínez argues that the forces of the death drive can only be resisted if resistance is understood as an ongoing process in which erotic action and the construction of pathways for sublimation are interminable tasks. We know that the final accomplishment of these tasks is impossible, but, like Freud’s “impossible professions,” they remain imperative. Though always incomplete, they remain undeniably urgent, and psychoanalysis and deconstruction remind us of their urgency. In complementary ways, both Freud and Derrida teach us that the death drive is insurmountable, but that through political action we can delay, defer, and postpone it. Martínez shows us that this effort of resistance must be uninterrupted. Calling for the creation and maintenance of a “community of mourning duelists,” this book builds toward the affirmation of the kind of “erotic battalion” that must always be mobilized.
Just Universities
Radical Hospitality
Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence
Arvo Pärt
Deconstruction in a Nutshell
Girl Head
Preaching with Their Lives
Theory for Beginners
Against Sustainability
