A dramatic and necessary rethinking of the meaning of Democracy
Democratic Anarchy grapples with an uncomfortable but obvious truth inimical to democracy: both aesthetics and politics depend on the structuring antagonism of inclusion and exclusion. Yet in Democratic Anarchy, Matthew Scully asks, how can "the people" be represented in a way that acknowledges what remains unrepresentable? What would it mean to face up to the constitutive exclusions that haunt U.S. democracy and its anxious fantasies of equality?
Synthesizing a broad range of theoretical traditions and interlocutorsāincluding Lacan, RanciĆØre, Edelman, and HartmanāDemocratic Anarchy polemically declares that there has never been, nor can there ever be, a realized democracy in the U.S. because democracy always depends on the hierarchical institution of a formal order by one part of the population over another. Engaging with an expansive corpus of American literature and art (Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louis Zukofsky, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nari Ward, Ocean Vuong, and Safiya Sinclair), Democratic Anarchy argues that many liberal concepts and institutions are in fact structurally opposed to democratic equality because they depend on regulating what can appear and in what form.
By focusing on works that disrupt this regulatory impulse, Scully shows how rhetorical strateĀgies of interruption, excess, and disorder figure the anarchic equality that inegalitarian fantasies of democracy disavow. Democratic Anarchy develops a rigorous theory of equality that refuses to repeat the inequalities against which it positions itself, and it does so by turning to moments of resistanceāboth aesthetic and politicalāinaugurated by the equality that inheres in and antagoĀnizes the order of things.
- 256 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
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Information
Publisher
Fordham University PressYear
2024Print ISBN
9781531507077
9781531507060
Edition
1eBook ISBN
9781531507084
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction: Democracyās Death Drive
- Part I: Democratic Aesthetics
- Part II: Aestheticidal Resistance
- Coda: Disavowal and Figural Annihilation
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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Yes, you can access Democratic Anarchy by Matthew Scully in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & North American Literary Criticism. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.