Philosophy Literature And Politics

Sometimes called the “literature of ideas,” science fiction is a natural medium for normative political philosophy. Science fiction’s focus on technology, space and time travel, non-human lifeforms, and parallel universes cannot help but invoke the perennial questions of political life, including the nature of a just social order and who should rule; freedom, free will, and autonomy; and the advantages and disadvantages of progress. Rather than offering a reading of a work inspired by a particular thinker or tradition, each chapter presents a careful reading of a classic or contemporary work in the genre (a novel, short story, film, or television series) to illustrate and explore the themes and concepts of political philosophy.

The politics of development in Africa have always been central concerns of the continent's literature. Yet ideas about the best way to achieve this development, and even what development itself should look like, have been hotly contested. African Literature as Political Philosophy looks in particular at Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah and Petals of Blood by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, but situates these within the broader context of developments in African literature over the past half-century, discussing writers from Ayi Kwei Armah to Wole Soyinka. M.S.C. Okolo provides a thorough analysis of the authors' differing approaches and how these emerge from the literature. She shows the roots of Achebe's reformism and Ngugi's insistence on revolution and how these positions take shape in their work. Okolo argues that these authors have been profoundly affected by the political situation of Africa, but have also helped to create a new African political philosophy.

This book examines the intersection of fictional narratives and political philosophy, focusing specifically on the use of short stories to teach the classic works of political philosophy. It is a resource for scholars and teachers of politics, philosophy, and literature.

The politics of literature is not the same as the politics of writers and their commitments, nor does it concern the way writers represent social structures or political struggles. The expression 'politics of literature' assumes that there is a specific connection between politics as a form of collective practice and literature as a historically determined regime of the art of writing. It implies that literature intervenes in the parceling out of space and time, place and identity, speech and noise, the visible and the invisible, that is the arena of the political. This book seeks to show how the literary revolution shatters the perceptible order that underpinned traditional hierarchies, but also why literary equality foils any bid to place literature in the service of politics or in its place. It tests its hypotheses on certain writers: Flaubert, Tolstoy, Hugo, Mallarmé, Brecht and Borges, to name a few. It also shows the consequences of this for psychoanalytical intepretation, historical narration and philosophical conceptualization.

Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics is a comprehensive collection devoted to the new field of research called 'intermedialities.' The concept of intermedialities stresses the necessity of situating philosophical and political debates on social relations in the divergent contexts of media theories, avant-garde artistic practices, continental philosophy, feminism, and political theory. The 'intermedial' approach to social relations does not focus on the shared identity but instead on the epistemological, ethical, and political status of inter (being-in-between). At stake here are the political analyses of new modes of being in common that transcend national boundaries, the critique of the new forms of domination that accompany them, and the search for new emancipatory possibilities. Opening a new approach to social relations, intermedialities investigates not only engagements between already constituted positions but even more the interval, antagonism, and differences that form and decenter these positions. Consequently, in opposition to the resurgence of cultural and ethnic particularisms and to the leveling of difference produced by globalization, the political and ethical analysis of the 'in-between' enables a conception of community based on difference, exposure, and interaction with others rather than on an identification with a shared identity. Investigations of 'in-betweenness,' both as medium specific and between heterogeneous 'sites' of inquiry, range here from philosophical conceptuality to artistic practices, from the political circulation of money and power to the operation of new technologies. They inevitably invoke the crucial role of embodiment in creative thought and collective acting. As a mediating instance between the psyche and society, matter and spirit, nature and culture, and biology and technology, the body is another interval forming and informed by socio-linguistic relations. As these complex intersections between media, materiality, art, and the philosophy and politics of the in-between suggest, the project of intermedialities provides new ways of rethinking relations among arts, politics, and science.

Almost fifty years ago, Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni published the manifesto “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” helping to set the agenda for a generation of film theory that used cinema as a means of critiquing capitalist ideology. In recent decades, film studies has moved away from politicized theory, abandoning the productive ways in which theory understands the relationship between cinema, politics, and art. In Cinema/Politics/Philosophy, Nico Baumbach revisits the much-maligned tradition of seventies film theory to reconsider: What does it mean to call cinema political? In this concise and provocative book, Baumbach argues that we need a new philosophical approach that sees cinema as both a mode of thought and a form of politics. Through close readings of the writings on cinema by the contemporary continental philosophers Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben, he asks us to rethink both the legacy of ideology critique and Deleuzian film-philosophy. He explores how cinema can condition philosophy through its own means, challenging received ideas about what is seeable, sayable, and doable. Cinema/Politics/Philosophy offers fundamental new ways to think about cinema as thought, art, and politics.