Rage and Time
A Psychopolitical Investigation
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- US$28.99
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- US$28.99
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While ancient civilizations worshipped strong, active emotions, modern societies have favored more peaceful attitudes, especially within the democratic process. We have largely forgotten the struggle to make use of thymos, the part of the soul that, following Plato, contains spirit, pride, and indignation. Rather, Christianity and psychoanalysis have promoted mutual understanding to overcome conflict. Through unique examples, Peter Sloterdijk, the preeminent posthumanist, argues exactly the opposite, showing how the history of Western civilization can be read as a suppression and return of rage.
By way of reinterpreting the Iliad, Alexandre Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo, and recent Islamic political riots in Paris, Sloterdijk proves the fallacy that rage is an emotion capable of control. Global terrorism and economic frustrations have rendered strong emotions visibly resurgent, and the consequences of violent outbursts will determine international relations for decades to come. To better respond to rage and its complexity, Sloterdijk daringly breaks with entrenched dogma and contructs a new theory for confronting conflict. His approach acknowledges and respects the proper place of rage and channels it into productive political struggle.
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A brilliant and conceptually rich analysis of the influence of rage on the development of Western culture. Tracing rage from its earliest Greek articulation as Thymos in the Iliad, Sloterdijk (Critique of Cynical Reason) argues for a notion of rage both as a motivating force in man s struggle for reward and recognition and as a foundational feature of the human understanding of time. According to the author, modernity has downplayed the primacy of rage in favor of a Freudian focus on desire as more fundamental to psychic life. These claims provide the framework for a demonstration of how rage has operated in the development of the psychopolitical history of the West, a history characterized by various attempts to save and invest rage, utilizing its force to further particular ideological ends, primarily religious and revolutionary. Though frequently hampered by excessive academic jargon and a theoretically questionable oscillation between the non-equivalent notions of Thymos and rage, the book offers a fascinating account of the historical dynamics of social development, one capable of holding a vast array of phenomena, from Biblical psalms to the 2005 Paris riots, within its purview.
