The Political Sublime (Thought in the Act) - Softcover

Shapiro, Michael J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822370522 ISBN 13: 9780822370529

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2018

Synopsis

In The Political Sublime Michael J. Shapiro formulates an original politics of aesthetics through an analysis of the experience of the sublime. Turning away from Kant's analysis of the sublime experience as a validation of the existence of a universal common sense, Shapiro draws on Deleuze, Lyotard, and Rancière to show how incomprehensible events and dilemmas provide openings for new political formations. He approaches the sublime through a range of artistic and cultural texts that address social crises and natural disasters, from the writing of James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates to the films of Ingmar Bergman and Spike Lee; these works suggest ways to channel the disruptive effects of the sublime into resistance to authority and innovative political initiative. Whether stemming from the threat of nuclear annihilation or the aftermath of an earthquake, the violence of racism and terrorism or the devastation of industrialism, sublime experience, Shapiro contends, allows for a rethinking of events in ways that reveal, redistribute, and create conditions of possibility for alternative communities of sense.

About this title

About the Author

Michael J. Shapiro is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and the author of numerous books, most recently Politics and Time.

Review

“With a capacious and generative writing style carried out through his usual exciting mode of political theorizing, Michael J. Shapiro takes up a challenging and daring position: the physical actuality—or, the thingness—of the sublime. This articulation of the fact of the political sublime is a notable achievement which makes for an impressive book.” (Davide Panagia, author of Rancière’s Sentiments)

“The notion of a rupture, a possibility at the heart of the aesthetic occurrence, has become central to aesthetic modernism. At the same time, the subsequent recuperation to recourse to a higher faculty has been held in suspicion. Michael J. Shapiro suggests something new: that the recuperation that follows rupture should be not rejected outright but relativized. In this impressive and important book, Shapiro bridges aesthetic concerns with political ones, showing how sublime experience can offer rallying points for the possibilities of social action. This is where we can move from the aesthetic to the political—from faltering experiences to a form of active response.” (Steven Shaviro, author of The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism)

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0822370522
• ISBN 13: 9780822370529
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 224