Liberalism and Human Suffering Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics

by Abbas, Asma

• ISBN13: 9780230104457
• ISBN10: 0230104452
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-09-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This book investigates the sources and implications of our encounters with suffering in contemporary politics and culture, exploring the forces that determine how suffering matters. It counters liberalism's distorting domestications of human suffering, which are most acute in its politics of redress through justice, the law, representation and inclusion. Radically rethinking the subjectivity of sufferers and arguing that our experience of the world is not prior to or outside of justice, but constitutive of it, the book recuperates a materialist politics that emphasizes sensuous activity, reclaims representation, and honors "the labor of suffering."

Author Biography

Asma Abbas teaches politics and philosophy at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Permissions	p. xii
Introduction: Suffering's Dead?	p. 1
Suffering Liberalism	p. 17
Incorporating the Victim	p. 19
Theater of the Ascetic	p. 45
The Liberal Sensorium	p. 73
Recuperating Materialism	p. 95
The Labor of Suffering	p. 97
A Fetishism of Injuries	p. 121
The Tragic Art of Historical Materialists	p. 143
Notes	p. 189
Bibliography	p. 221
Index	p. 237
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