Stupidity - Hardcover

Ronell, Avital

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252026136 ISBN 13: 9780252026133

Verlag: University of Illinois Press, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

"There are three things required for happiness: good health, selfishness, and stupidity, and without stupidity the others are useless." -- Gustave Flaubert There is something about stupidity that is untrackable; it evades our cognitive scanners and turns up as the uncanny double of mastery or intelligence. The political and social implications of stupidity have been articulated by Marx, Nietzsche, Deleuze, among others. Urgent yet recalcitrant, stupidity provokes a crisis in our understanding of politics, ethics, and psychoysis. The dilemma posed by the limited subject involves national identity, masochism and sexual politics, as well as the relation of poetic utterance to the stammer in which it originates. Essentially linked to the philosophical primal scene of stupor, stupidity also points to what has been historically inappropriable, as when Hannah Arendt considers Eichmann in terms not only of the bity but also the stupidity of evil. Avital Ronell's work studies the fading empire of cognition, modulating stupidity into idiocy, puerility, and the figure of the ridiculous philosopher instituted by Kant. Investigating ignorance, dumbfoundedness, and the limits of reason, Stupidity probes the pervasive practice of theory-bashing and related forms of paranoid aggression. A section on prolonged and debilitating illness pushes the text to an edge of a corporeal hermeneutics, "at the limits of what the body knows and tells."

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Illinois Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0252026136
• ISBN 13: 9780252026133
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 366
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar