The Fateful Discourse of Worldly ThingsStanford University Press, 1997 M07 1 - 428 pages This broad interdisciplinary and comparative study of the ways in which we discursively "make" the world and its things aims to go beyond the "poetic thinking" of Heidegger toward a more pragmatic way of interpreting concrete social, cultural, and political experience. The book outlines three constitutive functions of world-making. Endowing signifies the direct provision of the "wherewithal" that must come into being if anything else is to come into being. Enabling develops or facilitates what is endowed; it is a kind of education in being-in-the-world. Entitling embraces the realm of justice and decision; it concerns what is right for human beings to have and do and be. Placing these functions in contemporary contexts, the book offers as an alternative some perspectives of American pragmatism (Dewey, Peirce, James, Mead, Buchler) and Continental philosophy (Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Husserl, Barthes, Gramsci). The book closely examines the thinking of Hobbes, Descartes, Vico, Calderón, and Jefferson and several literary figures and thinkers (Yeats, Emerson, Hopkins, Baudelaire, Pascal, Rilke, Frost, Brecht). Throughout, the book investigates and questions the tradition of possessive individualism interpreted by modern scholars, notably Pocock. The book is in five parts. Part I argues a need to move beyond deconstructing toward reconstructing. Part II considers the interactions of endowing, enabling, and entitling. In Part III, the author explores the ways in which discourse works in the Cartesian discourse of reason, and the phenomenon of Manifest Destiny as rendered by Frost. The focus of Part IV is incorporating, which builds on Merleau-Ponty's concept of flesh, or the process by which the body acts and becomes fully worldly. Part V addresses the phenomena of experience in a variety of modes, including the role of story and natality, experimental theater, the epistolary novel, and representations of the heroic Lucretia. A postscript, exploring the "conclusion" with which scholarly books typically end, offers a perspectivist reading of the final text, Emerson's "Experience." |
Contents
| 1 | |
| 11 | |
Constituting | 79 |
Endowing Enabling Entitling 85 4 Impairing | 90 |
Constituting Political Discourse 98 6 Social | 103 |
Versions of Declension 114 11 When Destiny | 124 |
Discoursing | 151 |
Presentment 157 5 Discoursing of Things | 160 |
Incorporating | 219 |
Experiencing | 289 |
Introductory Overview 289 2 Deriving | 297 |
4 Experience Story Dialogue | 303 |
Experiencing Experimenting and Theatre | 314 |
Sublation and Subsumption 324 8 Expense | 349 |
Consequence and Reflection | 359 |
Concluding | 371 |
Discoursing of Made Things 171 9 Discourse | 181 |
A Destined Center 188 12 Dangerous | 199 |
14 | 212 |
NOTES | 387 |
INDEX | 403 |
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Common terms and phrases
action already Arendt beauty becomes body Brecht C. B. Macpherson calls César Vallejo Clarissa comes communication concept concrete constitution contrast Descartes destiny Dewey Dewey's dialectical discourse element Emerson enabling ence endowment entitled epic theater existence experience expression fact fate feeling figure flesh Hannah Arendt Hegel Heidegger hereafter cited parenthetically Hobbes human Ibid idea incorporate Indian individual Jefferson Kenneth Burke kind Lehrstück less letter novel Lucrece Lucretia Martin Heidegger matter means mediation mode moral nature object Pater Peirce person philosopher Plato poem poet poetic poetry political possession practice present question realm reason reconstructing relation scene sense signifies social society speak statue story sublation suggests synecdoche takes theory thinking thought tion tradition trans trope turn University Press Vallejo Venus de Milo Vico W. B. Yeats Werther Whitman words worldly things Yeats York
Popular passages
Page 262 - Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Page 121 - Though the earth, and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person. This no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his.
Page 121 - The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.
Page 64 - ... her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his...
Page 114 - The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.
Page 51 - value,' or 'worth,' of a man is, as of all other things, his price ; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power; and therefore is not absolute, but a thing dependent on the need and judgment of another.
Page 259 - Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume here Buckle ! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
Page 121 - But the chief matter of property being now not the fruits of the earth and the beasts that subsist on it, but the earth itself, as that which takes in and carries with it all the rest, I think it is plain that property in that, too, is acquired as the former.
Page 76 - How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics? Yet here's a travelled man that knows What he talks about. And there's a politician That has...
Page 75 - Under bare Ben Bulben's head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid. An ancestor was rector there Long years ago, a church stands near, By the road an ancient cross. No marble, no conventional phrase; On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!
References to this book
Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek No preview available - 1998 |
Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek No preview available - 1998 |