Tracing Global Democracy: Literature, Theory, and the Politics of Trauma

Vladimir Biti

Published by De Gruyter 2016

Tracing Global Democracy

Literature, Theory, and the Politics of Trauma

Vladimir Biti

Volume 7 in the series Culture & Conflict

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110457643

Overview
Contents

About this book

Focused on the recently hotly debated topic at the crossroads of various human and social sciences, this book investigates the emergence of the cosmopolitan idea of literature and its impact on the reconfiguration of the European and non-European political spaces. The birthplace of this idea is its designers’ traumatic experience as induced by the disconcerting condition of their abode.The thesis is that the eighteenth and nineteenth century’s cosmopolitan projects that grow out of such deep frustrations trace the twentieth century’s global democracy. This hidden origin of cosmopolitan projects dismantles the usual European representation of modernization as universal progress as myopic. Rather than being a generous action of prominent subjects such as Voltaire, Kant, and Goethe, or Bakhtin, Derrida and Deleuze, cosmopolitanism is an enforced reaction of the instances dispossessed by injury that search for the ways of healing it. Yet as soon as their remedy establishes itself as the ground for universal reconciliation, it risks suppressing other’s trauma, i.e. turns from politics into a police. Articulating the author’s position in the recent debates on the structure of democracy, the epilogue suggests an alternative strategy.

Author / Editor information

Vladimir Biti, Universität Wien, Vienna, Austria.

Reviews

"Vladimir Biti’s new book is a challenging read. To readers acquainted with his earlier publications this comes as no surprise; rather it confirms that Biti persists with the same rigor in his engagement with the past and present of human thinking. Nor does he in his new book relent with the demands he consistently makes of his readers. The minimum requirement to join him in his forays into thinking is an acquaintance with the greater part of Western thought."
Stipe Grgas in: Umjetnost riječi LIX, 1–2 (2015)

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	I
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	V
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	VII
Introduction: The Cosmopolitan Axis: Agencies and/or Enablers Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I: Toward a Global Community: The Emergence of the Modern Idea of Literature
1. The Divided Legacy of the Republic of Letters: Emancipation and Trauma Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	33
2. The Fissured Identity of Literature: National Universalism and/or Cosmopolitan Nationalism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	57
3. The Janus Face of Literary Bildung: Education and/or Self-Formation? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	83
4. Who Voices Universal History? Kant’s “Mankind” and/or Herder’s “Nature” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	99
5. Who Worlds the Literature? Goethe’s Weltliteratur and Globalization Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	133
Part II: An Observer under Observation: The Cosmopolitan Legacy of Modern Theory
6. Interiorizing the Exteriority: The Cosmopolitan Authorization of the Theoretical Truth Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179
7. The Narrative of Permanent Displacement: Early German Romanticism and Its Theoretical Afterlife Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	195
8. The Oppositional Literary Transcendental: The Russian Formalist Rewriting of Early Romanticist Cosmopolitanism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	213
9. The All-Devouring Modern Mind: Bakhtin’s Cosmopolitan Self Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	235
10. Countering the Empirical Evidence: From Immigrant Cosmopolitanism to a Cosmopolitanism of the Disregarded Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	257
11. Political and/or Literary Community: From Class to Messianic Cosmopolitanism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	285
12. Literature as Deterritorialization: New Vistas for Democracy? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	319
Epilogue: The Practice of Recommencing: Toward a Cosmopolitanism of the Dispossessed Belonging Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	345
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	357
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	385

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter
Audience: Literary and Cultural Studies; Romanticism and Enlightenment Studies; Postcolonial and Political theory; Trauma Studies
Pages
- Front matter: 9
- Main content: 394
Keywords: Literature; democracy; cosmopolitanism; trauma

eBook

Published: January 15, 2016
ISBN: 9783110457643

Hardcover

Published: January 15, 2016
ISBN: 9783110455755

Paperback

Published: November 7, 2017
ISBN: 9783110577822