Bøger af Stathis Gourgouris

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.

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.

Against the backdrop of ever-increasing nationalist violence during the last decade of the twentieth century, this book challenges standard analyses of nation formation by elaborating on the nation's dream-like hold over the modern social imagination. Stathis Gourgouris argues that the national fantasy lies at the core of the Enlightenment imaginary, embodying its central paradox: the intertwining of anthropological universality with the primacy of a cultural ideal.Crucial to the operation of this paradox and fundamental in its ambiguity is the figure of Greece, the universal alibi and cultural predicate behind national-cultural consolidation throughout colonialist Europe. The largely unpredictable institution of a modern Greek nation in 1830 undoes the interweaving of Enlightenment and Philhellenism, whose centrifugal strands continue to unravel the certainty of European history, down to the internal predicaments of the European Union or the tragedy of the Balkan conflicts.This 25th Anniversary edition of the book includes a new preface by the author in which he situates the book's original insights in retrospect against the newer developments in the social and political conditions of a now globalized world: the neocolonial resurgence of nationalism and racism, the failure of social democratic institutions, the crisis of sovereignty and citizenship, and the brutal conditions of stateless peoples.

This is an original and important study of nation formation as social imaginary . . . adopting insights from a variety of disciplines (literary criticism, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy, economics). Vassilis Lambropolous, Ohio State University."

In wide-ranging essays that are at once poetic and polemical, Stathis Gourgouris offers a philosophical anthropology that confronts the legacy of "monarchical thinking": the desire to subjugate oneself to unitary principles and structures, whether political or moral, theological or secular.

Disrupting recent fashionable debates on secularism, this book raises the stakes on how we understand the space of the secular, independent of its battle with the religious, as a space of radical democratic politics that refuse to be theologized.

In dialogue with a broad range of 20th-century thinkers, Gourgouris examines a range of literary texts, from Sophocles' "Antigone" to Don DeLillo's "The Names", as he traces out his argument that literature possesses an intrinsic theoretical capacity to make sense of the non-propositional.