Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics - Hardcover

Harvey, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 150132960X ISBN 13: 9781501329609

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017

Synopsis

Sharing Common Ground makes a compelling contribution to an important emerging field that affects a broad swath of humanities. It uses historical, photographic, and literary examples, including an entirely new translation of a little known work by Marguerite Duras, presented here in full, to showcase the ethical capacity of art. Robert Harvey deploys critical tools borrowed from literature, aesthetics, and philosophy to mobilize the thought of several seminal figures in literature and theory including Michel Foucault, Marguerite Duras, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Giorgio Agamben, among a host of others.

Construction sites, concentration camps, cemeteries, slums-such are only a few of the spaces that impel our imagination naturally toward what we commonly call “cultural memory.” Sharing Common Ground reveals how the endeavor to think and imagine in common, and especially about the spaces we inhabit together, is critically important to human beings, artistically, culturally, and ethically.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Harvey is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at Stony Brook University, USA. He is the author of Witnessness: Beckett, Dante, Levi and the Foundations of Responsibility (2010).

Review

“In the context of global capitalism and rising nationalisms, space is clearly a major issue. This is, in my view, the broader context from which Robert Harvey’s book Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics draws its relevance and, more importantly, its urgency ... Looking at ‘spaces otherwise’ such as concentration camps, slums, and cemeteries, the book examines their ethical potentialities and offers a crucial addition to the emerging field of heterotopology. It argues that even though these spaces cleave us, leaving us with a sense of shock and terror in face of the unimaginable, they also create a sense of belonging that is ultimately a fertile ground for empathic experiences. The book is well documented and extremely comprehensive. It would be impossible to provide a summary, for it demonstrates a mastery and sure knowledge of a constellation of concepts taken from a wide range of figures including Giorgio Agamben, Georges Didi-Huberman, Marguerite Duras, and Immanuel Kant, among many others. [T]he reader will certainly be dazzled by this book.” - Critical Inquiry

“Harvey (cultural studies and comparative literature, Stony Brook Univ.) provides complex readings and difficult analyses of poets', novelists', and philosophers' writings. Included is a new translation, and lengthy analysis, of Marguerite Duras's story "Construction Sites," which inspired Foucault in his documentation of points of rupture in discourse and history. Harvey discusses two important concepts that open a "space for ethics" in the form of empathy. The first is the point d’hérésie, the movement from lack of imagination, blind acceptance of the status quo, toward heretical resistance to the established order. In chapter 4, Harvey writes, “While power busies itself endlessly differentiating by means of names and thereby producing species, the little perverts busy themselves by refusing to produce the species while infinitely, instead, producing difference.” The second concept is the intricate relation expressed in the word partager: the division between people that nevertheless unites them, the paradoxical common ground between established order and transgressive alternatives. Attempts to confine the Other―ragpickers, the homeless, drunks, prostitutes, the ill, the mad―are never complete. Primo Levi’s account of "gray zones" in the concentration camps showed that the space that separates victims and persecutors is never empty. Though obscure, this erudite, scholarly book bears on current struggles with xenophobic reactions to difference. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.” - CHOICE

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 150132960X
• ISBN 13: 9781501329609
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 328