Raids on Human Consciousness: Writing, Anarchism, and ViolenceHowever one looks at violence -- as an instrument of bureaucracy or ideology; as a product of racial, gender, or class antagonisms; or as the inevitable result of power politics -- it is an integral part of every social system and is one of the most pressing problems of our tortured century. In Raids on Human Consciousness Arthur Redding examines the contention that violence, be it the mass product of revolutionary uprising or a private sadomasochistic indulgence, may be taken to instill in those who commit it the capacity for radical change. Conscious that mainstream theory considers violence deviant, a departure from the normal equilibrium of social and aesthetic structures, while other critiques take it to be integral to any dynamic system, Redding begins with the anarchist inquiry into the relationship of violence to the imaginary representation of modern communities. He explores the "public images" of anarchism in literature and popular culture and emphasizes the diverse strategies by which modern writers encounter, derive, deflect, and manipulate fantasies of political violence. Redding recognizes that language fails when confronted with the extreme suffering of human bodies. Acknowledging that flesh is subject to war, torture, and everyday brutality -- violations to which language can never do justice -- he nonetheless finds it urgent to reclaim language on the far side of suffering. |
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... marks the always circumstantial and elusive border between virtu- ality and event , and this space is , as Blanchot argues elsewhere ( 1955 ) , the very space of literature . This space coexists with the legal paradigms of a language of ...
... marks him as one of the elect for whom a new order stripped of class biases should rightly be built . Of course , he ... Mark Seltzer argues in his chapter on the novel in Henry James and the Art of Power ( 1984 ) , James's work ...
... marks a pointed retreat into the formal , a self - conscious retreat from the base politics of philistines . A Jamesian style marking the specific juncture that demands the shelter of irony cannot be sustained throughout the century ...
Contents
Satire Georges Sorel | 30 |
Anarchism and | 71 |
Violence and Modernism | 117 |
Copyright | |
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Raids on Human Consciousness: Writing, Anarchism, and Violence Arthur F. Redding No preview available - 1998 |