The Modern Self in the Labyrinth: Politics and the Entrapment Imagination

Передня обкладинка
Harvard University Press, 17 черв. 2004 р. - 250 стор.

This book explores the distinct historical-political imagination of the self in the twentieth century and advances two arguments. First, it suggests that we should read the history of modern political philosophy afresh in light of a theme that emerges in the late eighteenth century: the rift between self and social institutions. Second, it argues that this rift was reformulated in the twentieth century in a manner that contrasts with the optimism of nineteenth-century thinkers regarding its resolution. It proposes a new political imagination of the twentieth century found in the works of Weber, Freud, and Foucault, and characterizes it as one of "entrapment."

Eyal Chowers shows how thinkers working within diverse theoretical frameworks and fields nevertheless converge in depicting a self that has lost its capacity to control or transform social institutions. He argues that Weber, Freud, and Foucault helped shape the distinctive thought and culture of the past century by portraying a dehumanized and distorted self marked by sameness. This new political imagination proposes coping with modernity through the recovery, integration, and assertion of the self, rather than by mastering and refashioning collective institutions.

 

Зміст

Modernity HyperOrder and Doubleness
13
Doubleness in Kant and Frankenstein
23
Conclusion
38
ProtoEntrapment Theories
40
Overcoming Doubleness
41
From ProtoEntrapment to Entrapment Theories
55
Max Weber Between HomoHermeneut and the Lebende Maschine
63
Webers Anthropology
66
Freuds Theory of Instincts and the Origins of Discontent
104
Modernity and das Unheimliche
109
Freuds Theory of the Oedipal Complex
124
Michel Foucault From the PrisonHouse of Language to the Silence of the Panopticon
141
Foucaults Critique of Freud and Weber
144
Entrapment and Language
150
Entrapment and Power
167
Conclusion
177

Webers Concept of Personality
73
The Disciplined Self and the RightsProtected Space
78
The Fragility of Meaning
85
Conclusion
94
Freud and the Castration of the Modern
98
Conclusion
184
Abbreviations
203
Notes
206
Index
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Сторінка 7 - The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur.
Сторінка 7 - In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations ; frequently to one or two.

Про автора (2004)

Eyal Chowers is Senior Lecturer and the Chair of the Political Science Department at Tel-Aviv University.

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