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About this book
During the Enlightenment, Western scholars racialized ideas, deeming knowledge based on reality superior to that based on ideality. Scholars labeled inquiries into ideality, such as animism and soul-migration, "savage philosophy," a clear indicator of the racism motivating the distinction between the real and the ideal. In their view, the savage philosopher mistakes connections between signs for connections between real objects and believes that discourse can have physical effects—in other words, they believe in magic.
Christopher Bracken's Magical Criticism brings the unacknowledged history of this racialization to light and shows how, even as we have rejected ethnocentric notions of "the savage," they remain active today in everything from attacks on postmodernism to Native American land disputes. Here Bracken reveals that many of the most influential Western thinkers dabbled in savage philosophy, from Marx, Nietzsche, and Proust, to Freud, C. S. Peirce, and Walter Benjamin. For Bracken, this recourse to savage philosophy presents an opportunity to reclaim a magical criticism that can explain the very real effects created by the discourse of historians, anthropologists, philosophers, the media, and governments.
Christopher Bracken's Magical Criticism brings the unacknowledged history of this racialization to light and shows how, even as we have rejected ethnocentric notions of "the savage," they remain active today in everything from attacks on postmodernism to Native American land disputes. Here Bracken reveals that many of the most influential Western thinkers dabbled in savage philosophy, from Marx, Nietzsche, and Proust, to Freud, C. S. Peirce, and Walter Benjamin. For Bracken, this recourse to savage philosophy presents an opportunity to reclaim a magical criticism that can explain the very real effects created by the discourse of historians, anthropologists, philosophers, the media, and governments.
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Yes, you can access Magical Criticism by Christopher Bracken in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & World History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Publisher
University of Chicago PressYear
2008Print ISBN
9780226069913, 9780226069906eBook ISBN
9780226069920Table of contents
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: What Are Savages For?
- Chapter One: Discourse Is Now
- Chapter Two: The New Barbarism
- Chapter Three: The Mana Type
- Chapter Four: Commodity Totemism
- Chapter Five: Allegories of the Sun, Specters of Excess
- Coda: The Solaris Hypothesis
- Notes
- References
- Index