Overview

"Nothing Sacred makes a bold call for reconceptualizing the projects of humanism and democracy as creative sources of emancipatory meaning, from the immediate political sphere to the farthest reaches of planetary ways of living. Restaging Aristotle's classic notion of the ""political animal"" in broad historical and geographical frames, Stathis Gourgouris explores the autopoietic capacities of human-being in society, while developing new frameworks of anticolonial humanism and radical democracy as the only worthy adversaries of neoliberal capitalism. This reconfigured anthropological horizon enables us to imagine new ways of living by learning to pursue a radical politics of autonomy and a planetary vision that upholds life-affirming coexistence and equal sharing against the fetishism of hierarchy and servitude, money and technologic, sovereignty and endless growth. Written with daring, erudition, and anarchic contestation, this book seeks the political through a poetic perspective. Nothing Sacred rejects niche thinking in the academy and engages a vast domain of reflections on the problem of human-being in today's dismal world."

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If, as Adorno contended, history does intrude on every word, if it withholds each word from the recovery of some alleged original meaning, it is incumbent upon us to attend to each and every word we use with exacting attention. No one I read these days foregrounds, indeed, rethinks words, the most demanding words, with the unflinching attention, with the capacious erudition and the poetic creation, demanded and exemplified by Stathis Gourgouris. Thus, with human-being, Gourgouris attends to the intrusive and withholding history of animality, race, and technology; with democracy, to that of anarchy and finitude, of violence and tragedy, of capitalism; and with the sacred—Gourgouris tarries for effect—nothing. This is a formidable book. -- Gil Anidjar, Columbia University Nothing Sacred shows the virtue and necessity of secular criticism and the substantial gifts it can provide. In elegant prose that is profoundly reflective on the constituents of life and thought, Stathis Gourgouris investigates the most complex problems of our time and how they came to be. This book stands out for its display of the innovative critical thinking that is essential to escape epistemological and practical political impasse. -- Paul A. Bové, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh At once nuanced, profoundly learned, and passionate, Gourgouris deftly extends his dazzling local analyses across the disciplines of politics and theology, literary and art criticism, psychoanalysis and feminism, anthropology and cybernetics. His rethinking of the basic assumptions underpinning settled conceptualizations will set the understanding of humanism and democracy on an entirely new basis. -- Donald E. Pease, Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities, Dartmouth College

Nothing Sacred shows the virtue and necessity of secular criticism and the substantial gifts it can provide. In elegant prose that is profoundly reflective on the constituents of life and thought, Stathis Gourgouris investigates the most complex problems of our time and how they came to be. This book stands out for its display of the innovative critical thinking that is essential to escape epistemological and practical political impasse. -- Paul A. Bové, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh At once nuanced, profoundly learned, and passionate, Gourgouris deftly extends his dazzling local analyses across the disciplines of politics and theology, literary and art criticism, psychoanalysis and feminism, anthropology and cybernetics. His rethinking of the basic assumptions underpinning settled conceptualizations will set the understanding of humanism and democracy on an entirely new basis. -- Donald E. Pease, Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities, Dartmouth College

Author Information

Stathis Gourgouris is professor of classics, English, and comparative literature and society at Columbia University. He is the author of several books on political philosophy, aesthetics, and poetics, the most recent being The Perils of the One (Columbia, 2019).

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