ABSTRACT

Critique of Violence is a highly original and lucid investigation of the heated controversy between poststructuralism and critical theory. Leading theorist Beatrice Hanssen uses Walter Benjamin's essay 'Critique of Violence' as a guide to analyse the contentious debate, shifting the emphasis from struggle to dialogue between the two parties. Regarding the questions of critique and violence as the major meeting points between both traditions, Hanssen positions herself between the two in an effort to investigate what critical theory and poststructuralism have to offer each other. In the course of doing so, she assembles imaginative new readings of Benjamin, Arendt, Fanon and Foucault, and incisively explores the politics of recognition, the violence of language, and the future of feminist theory.
This groundbreaking book will be essential reading for all students of continental philosophy, political theory, social studies and comparative literature.
Also available in this series:
Essays on Otherness
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Pb: 0-415-13108-1: £15.99
Hegel After Derrida
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The Hypocritical Imagination
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Philosophy and Tragedy
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Textures of Light
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Very Little ... Almost Nothing
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Pb: 0-415-12822-6: £15.99

chapter |15 pages

Introduction

chapter |14 pages

On the Politics of Pure Means

Benjamin, Arendt, Foucault

chapter |67 pages

Between Kant and Nietzsche

Foucalt's Critique

chapter |61 pages

Power/Force/War

On Foucault's “Society Must Be Defended”

chapter |21 pages

The Violence of Language

chapter |7 pages

Violence and Interpretation

Enzensberger's Civil Wars

chapter |24 pages

Ethics of the Other

chapter |22 pages

Limits of Feminist Representation

Elfriede Jelinek's Language of Violence