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Author:   Professor Simon Wortham
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic
Weight:   0.308kg
ISBN:  

9781350105294

ISBN 10:   1350105295
Pages:   184
Publication Date:   14 November 2019
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Hope against hope Twenty-two short essays on the politics of optimism Immanuel Kant, Choosing what is best Voltaire, Bien (tout est) Arthur Schopenhauer, Eating the other Benedict de Spinoza, Hope, faith and judgement Friedrich Nietzsche, Imperfect nihilism Maurice Blanchot, Hope and poetry Jacques Derrida, Yes, yes Emmanuel Levinas, Sociality and solitude Sigmund Freud, `A time-consuming business' Melanie Klein, `Therapeutic pessimism' in Kristeva's view Julia Kristeva, `Psychoanalysis-a Counterdepressant' Walter Benjamin, `Pessimism all along the line' Theodor Adorno, `Hurrah-optimism' Hannah Arendt, `The right to expect miracles' Slavoj Zizek, Hopeless courage (with Hegel and Badiou) Franz Kafka, `Plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope-but not for us' (re-reading Walter Benjamin) Jacques Derrida, Hegel, Bataille, negativity and affirmation Frantz Fanon, Recognition and conflict Hannah Arendt, Violence and power Etienne Balibar, Politics and psychoanalysis Hans Kelsen, Politics and the `impolitical' Sigmund Freud, Super-ego politics index

Reviews

Neo-liberalism's savage hegemony shapes subjects and affects together: jaded, pessimistic, indifferent, or their twins, entrepreneurial, risk-taking, long-range, even future-proof subjects. Can we still hope-for forms of association, action, the distribution of resources and enjoyment, other than those marked and made by this hegemonic formation? What grounds are there for optimism? Simon Morgan Wortham makes from the materials of the Western Enlightenment a genealogy for a politics of optimism-substantially groundless, necessary. By showing that thought is never either past-proof or future-proof Hope: The Politics of Optimism rigorously and lucidly redefines politics for our torn present. -- Jacques Lezra, Professor and Chair, Department of Hispanic Studies University of California--Riverside, United States Simon Wortham's eminently readable new book unfolds the dialectic of hope from Spinoza to Balibar. Hope: The Politics of Optimism traces with brilliance and insight this constitutive oscillation between optimism and despair across modern leftist thought, to argue that even the bleakest nihilism remains grounded in the originary affirmation of all enunciation, from which depths critique can hope, finally, to put real limits to power. -- Nick Nesbitt, Professor of Languages and Literatures, Princeton University, USA

Author Information

Simon Wortham is Professor of Critical Humanities, Kingston University London, UK. He is author of Resistance and Psychoanalysis (2017), Samuel Weber: Acts of Reading (2017), Modern Thought in Pain: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis (2015), The Poetics of Sleep (Bloomsbury, 2013), The Derrida Dictionary (Bloomsbury, 2010), Derrida: Writing Events (Bloomsbury, 2008), Experimenting: Essays with Samuel Weber (2007), Counter-Institutions (2006) and Rethinking the University (2009)

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