The Critique of Nonviolence
eBook - ePub

The Critique of Nonviolence

Martin Luther King, Jr., and Philosophy

  1. 232 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Critique of Nonviolence

Martin Luther King, Jr., and Philosophy

About this book

How does Martin Luther King, Jr., understand race philosophically and how did this understanding lead him to develop an ontological conception of racist police violence?

In this important new work, Mark Christian Thompson attempts to answer these questions, examining ontology in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s philosophy. Specifically, the book reads King through 1920s German academic debates between Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Bultmann, Hans Jonas, Carl Schmitt, Eric Voegelin, Hannah Arendt, and others on Being, gnosticism, existentialism, political theology, and sovereignty. It further examines King's dissertation about Tillich, as well other key texts from his speculative writings, sermons, and speeches, positing King's understanding of divine love as a form of Heideggerian ontology articulated in beloved community.

Tracking the presence of twentieth-century German philosophy and theology in his thought, the book situates King's ontology conceptually and socially in nonviolent protest. In so doing, The Critique of Nonviolence reads King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (1963) with Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" (1921) to reveal the depth of King's political-theological critique of police violence as the illegitimate appropriation of the racialized state of exception. As Thompson argues, it is in part through its appropriation of German philosophy and theology that King's ontology condemns the perpetual American state of racial exception that permits unlimited police violence against Black lives.

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Yes, you can access The Critique of Nonviolence by Mark Christian Thompson in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. Table of Contents
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Introduction: Ontology and Nonviolence
  9. 1. Being and Nonviolence
  10. 2. Nonbeing and Nonviolence
  11. 3. Black power as Nonviolence
  12. 4. Gnosticism and Nonviolence
  13. 5. Divine Nonviolence
  14. Conclusion: Eros as Nonviolence
  15. Notes
  16. Bibliography
  17. Index