Ebook: Distillations: theory, ethics, affect

Intro; Title Page; Copyright Page; Contents; Acknowledgments; Author's note; Introduction; Chapter 1: The posthumanist universal: Between precarity and rebellion; The crisis of multiculturalism; The ethical tensions of the face; The revival of universalism; The singular and the universal; The victim versus the immortal; Sara Ahmed's brick wall; But what is the universal?; Historically specific universalism; The radicalness of the universal; Breaking with tradition, culture, and custom; Chapter 2: The bad habits of critical theory: On the rigid rituals of thought; Slaying the humanist subject.;"Distilling into concise and focused formulations many of the main ideas that Mari Ruti has sought to articulate throughout her writing career, this book reflects on the general state of contemporary theory as it relates to posthumanist ethics, political resistance, subjectivity, agency, desire, and bad feelings such as anxiety. It offers a critique of progressive theory's tendency to advance extreme models of revolt that have little real-life applicability. The chapters move fluidly between several theoretical registers, the most obvious of these being continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, Butlerian ethics, affect theory, and queer theory. One of the central aims of Distillations is to explore the largely uncharted territory between psychoanalysis and affect theory, which are frequently pitted against each other as hopelessly incompatible, but which Ruti shows can be brought into a productive dialogue."--Bloomsbury Publishing.