Modernity and the Political Fix

by Andrew Gibson, Arthur Bradley (Editor), Michael Dillon (Editor), Ward Blanton (Editor), Yvonne Sherwood (Editor)

Overview

From their decisive emergence in the late eighteenth century, modernity and modern politics were long haunted by irony and paradox. Ours, however, is the age of the implosion of modernity. Modernity has degenerated into self-parody. The polarities that an ironic grasp of it could potentially always hold in tension are finally collapsing into each other.

In Modernity and the Political Fix, Andrew Gibson tells the relevant story and asks what aspects of modern politics we might want to salvage and preserve and within what structure we might continue thinking about them. His answer is that these questions call for the isolation of a particular set of concepts; that, rightly positioned in relation to one another, the concepts amount to a political theology; that the very formulation of political temporality is therefore at stake; and that the thinking in question has been and is best represented in modern philosophy and art, above all, modern literature. Ranging through early modern and modern thought from Hobbes, Pascal and Leibniz to Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard to Foucault, Lacan, Badiou, Jambet and Rancière, and in modern literature and art from Wordsworth and Byron to Goya and Wagner, Huysmans and Wilde, Joyce and Woolf, Joseph Roth, Vicki Baum, Gabriele Tergit and the Weimar novel, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell to R.S. Thomas and Norman Nicholson, Gibson seeks to compile a modern political aide-memoire, a treasury for a politics to come.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350096974
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	04/18/2019
Series:	Political Theologies
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Andrew Gibson was Research Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, where he still teaches part-time. He is currently Visiting Professor at the J.M. Coetzee Centre at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and was until recently a member of the Conseil Scientifique of the Collège Internationale de Philosophie in Paris. His many books include Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Contemporary French Philosophy (2012) and Misanthropy (Bloomsbury, 2017).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction: Modernity and the Political Fix 1

Ironical modernity 1

Byron as paradigm 8

Benjamin and 'saianic modernity' 13

Functions of modern literature 15

1 The Implosion of Modernity 23

The way we live now 23

Twelve features of the neoliberal mythos 31

Leibniz triumpkans 41

Political theology and counterdemocracy 44

2 Absolute Historicity 51

Heidegger and radical finitude 51

Foucault and his methods 55

Joyce's historical materialism 63

3 Event 69

Back to Badiou 69

Pro and contra the event 75

Kant and speculative reason 81

Woolf's 'strata of being' 85

4 Remainder 89

Carpaccio and the atomized emporium 89

'Mondes atones' from Hobbes to Schopenhauer 91

Wagner without redemption 97

5 The People Untranstormed 111

The unbridged gap 111

Agon of Weimar 113

Joseph Roth and 'the indolence of the heart' 116

Canetti and general solipsism 124

Rancière, Orwell and knowing the people 125

6 Transmission 135

A melancholic-ecstatic conception of history 135

Occupation and the survival of truth 142

Lacanian caveats 144

Transmission against the grain 154

Conclusion; A Political Theology 161

An inductive thought 161

Political theology and its critics 164

Schmitt, Blumenberg, Lefort 169

Metapboncs from the Old Testament to Kierkegaard 176

In the end, the poets 189

Notes 199

Index 227

Editorial Reviews

Andrew Gibson's is a very significant book - a cultural intervention in the Nietzschean vein and, at times, manner. Paradoxically, it proposes a political theology that is resolutely secular, but justifies its resort to the materials of theology; in other words, it finesses the commonplace argument that modern political thought is necessarily if unwittingly and, in defiance of its own resolutions to the contrary, theological. It is a profound and passionate meditation on modernism - its achievements as well as its discontents - and I recommend it without reservation.

Heeding vast amounts of historical, literary and conceptual work, Gibson weaves a compelling narrative that enlists thinking modalities from a wide variety of genres. What is especially important about Gibson's framing of the investigation is that in turning to the idea of "ironical modernity" the book challenges Richard Rorty's stultifying assertion that irony is alien to political commitment. Politics and irony are intimately interconnected for Gibson, precisely because he embraces a politics that accepts historical contingency as much as it does the contingencies of subjectivity. Crucially Gibson embraces a political theology that is yet to come. He focuses on how we can enrich our political grasp of modernity to elaborate a theologically-influenced conception of historical or human time "without finality."

From the Publisher