Author: Alberto Toscano
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1786630567
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 447
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Book Description
A genealogy of fanaticism—unearthing its long history, before it became a tool in the Clash of Civilizations It is commonplace to hear fanaticism described as a deviant or extreme variant of an already irrational set of religious beliefs, an assertion that helps to demonize convictions outside political orthodoxy. Alberto Toscano’s compelling and erudite counter-history explodes this accepted convention by exploring the critical role fanaticism played in the formation of modern politics and the liberal state. Showing how fanaticism results from a failure to formulate an adequate emancipatory politics, this illuminating history sheds new light on an idea that continues to dominate debates about faith and secularism. This expanded edition includes new material that revisits the idea of fanaticism as it operates at the limits of the liberal political imaginary, highlighting its relation to fraternal violence, political purity and the refusal of compromise, as well as its centrality to times of social crisis and international conflict.
Author: Ross Lerner
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823283887
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
We may think we know what defines religious fanaticism: violent action undertaken with dogmatic certainty. But the term fanatic, from the European Reformation to today, has never been a stable one. Then and now it has been reductively defined to justify state violence and to delegitimize alternative sources of authority. Unknowing Fanaticism rejects the simplified binary of fanatical religion and rational politics, turning to Renaissance literature to demonstrate that fanaticism was integral to how both modern politics and poetics developed, from the German Peasants’ Revolt to the English Civil War. The book traces two entangled approaches to fanaticism in this long Reformation moment: the targeting of it as an extreme political threat and the engagement with it as a deep epistemological and poetic problem. In the first, thinkers of modernity from Martin Luther to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke positioned themselves against fanaticism to pathologize rebellion and abet theological and political control. In the second, which arose alongside and often in response to the first, the poets of fanaticism investigated the link between fanatical self-annihilation—the process by which one could become a vessel for divine violence—and the practices of writing poetry. Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton recognized in the fanatic’s claim to be a passive instrument of God their own incapacity to know and depict the origins of fanaticism. Yet this crisis of unknowing was a productive one. It led these writers to experiment with poetic techniques that would allow them to address fanaticism’s tendency to unsettle the boundaries between human and divine agency and between individual and collective bodies. These poets demand a new critical method, which this book attempts to model: a historically-minded and politicized formalism that can attend to the complexity of the poetic encounter with fanaticism.
Author: Amos Oz
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691148635
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 104
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Book Description
Proposes that the murderous violence that has riven our society is driven as much by confusion as by inescapable hatred. Challenging the reductionist division of people by race, religion, and class, Sen presents a vision of a world that can be made to move toward peace as firmly as it has spiraled in recent years toward brutality and war. - from publisher information.
Author: Amanda Montell
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062993178
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
“One of those life-changing reads that makes you see—or, in this case, hear—the whole world differently.” —Megan Angelo, author of Followers “At times chilling, often funny, and always perceptive and cogent, Cultish is a bracing reminder that the scariest thing about cults is that you don't realize you're in one till it's too late.”—Refinery29.com The New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Magical Overthinking and Wordslut analyzes the social science of cult influence: how “cultish” groups, from Jonestown and Scientologists to SoulCycle and social media gurus, use language as the ultimate form of power. What makes “cults” so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we’re looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join—and more importantly, stay in—extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell’s argument is that, on some level, it already has . . . Our culture tends to provide pretty flimsy answers to questions of cult influence, mostly having to do with vague talk of “brainwashing.” But the true answer has nothing to do with freaky mind-control wizardry or Kool-Aid. In Cultish, Montell argues that the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language. In both positive ways and shadowy ones, cultish language is something we hear—and are influenced by—every single day. Through juicy storytelling and cutting original research, Montell exposes the verbal elements that make a wide spectrum of communities “cultish,” revealing how they affect followers of groups as notorious as Heaven’s Gate, but also how they pervade our modern start-ups, Peloton leaderboards, and Instagram feeds. Incisive and darkly funny, this enrapturing take on the curious social science of power and belief will make you hear the fanatical language of “cultish” everywhere.
Author: Voltaire
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : French drama
Languages : en
Pages : 80
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Book Description
The play is a study of religious fanaticism and self-serving manipulation based on an episode in the traditional biography of Muhammad in which he orders the murder of his critics. Voltaire described the play as "written in opposition to the founder of a false and barbarous sect".
Author: Dominique Colas
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804727365
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 526
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Book Description
Includes bibliographical refeerences and index.
Author: Osho
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0312595484
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
In "Belief, Doubt, and Fanaticism", Osho brings his unique and often surprising perspective to the religious, political, social and economic forces that drive people into opposing camps, fanatical groups, and belief systems that depend on seeing every "other" as the "enemy." As always, the focus is first and foremost on the individual psyche and consciousness, to identify the root causes and hidden demons of our human need to belong and have something to "believe in."
Author: Pascal Bruckner
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745670148
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 153
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Book Description
The planet is sick. Human beings are guilty of damaging it. We have to pay. Today, that is the orthodoxy throughout the Western world. Distrust of progress and science, calls for individual and collective self-sacrifice to ‘save the planet’ and cultivation of fear: behind the carbon commissars, a dangerous and counterproductive ecological catastrophism is gaining ground. Modern society’s susceptibility to this kind of thinking derives from what Bruckner calls “the seductive attraction of disaster,” as exemplified by the popular appeal of disaster movies. But ecological catastrophism is harmful in that it draws attention away from other, more solvable problems and injustices in the world in order to focus on something that is portrayed as an Apocalypse. Rather than preaching catastrophe and pessimism, we need to develop a democratic and generous ecology that addresses specific problems in a practical way.
Author: Simon Ross Valentine
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1849046158
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
Wahhabism is an Islamic reform movement found mainly in Saudi Arabia. Closely linked to the Saudi monarchy, it enforces a strict code of morality and conduct monitored by mutawa (religious police), and governs every facet of Saudi life according to its own strict interpretation of Shariah, including gender segregation. Wahhabism also prohibits the practice of any other faith (even other forms of Islam) in Saudi Arabia, which is also the only country that forbids women from driving. But what exactly is Wahhabism? This question had long occupied Valentine, so he lived in the Kingdom for three years, familiarizing himself with its distinct interpretation of Islam. His book defines Wahhabism and Wahhabi beliefs and considers the life and teaching of Muham-mad ibn Abd'al Wahhab and the later expansion of his sect. Also discussed are the rejection of later developments in Islam such as bid'ah; harmful innovations, among them celebrating the prophet's birthday and visiting the tombs of saints; the destruction of holy sites due to the fear of idolatry; Wahhabi law, which imposes the death sentence for crimes as archaic as witch- craft and sorcery, and the connection of Wahhabism with militant Islam globally. Drawing on interviews with Saudis from all walks of life, including members of the feared mutawa, this book appraises of one of the most significant movements in contemporary Islam.
Author: Deborah Pope
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807117477
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 66
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Book Description
"The poems in Fanatic Heart, Deborah Pope's remarkably accomplished first collection of verse, are distinguished by their sensuous language, assured voice, and surpassing intelligence. "These are poems with a definite edge to them," notes the poet Betty Adcock. Memory and identity, family and place, lives that encompass both "the wingsweep of joy" and "the fierce hug of grief" - these are Pope's concerns. Hers are poems of pain and loss, but they are also, and more tellingly, poems of wonder, of love and passion in their various guises, of the ambiguity in every human relation - an ambiguity skillfully evoked in "Signs": In these woods we have chosen / with scarcely more knowing / than we chose each other, / prospects will always promise / more than they come to. / The solidity of this house is surface, / the permanence of anything is myth. / We take our visions edged, / at home in a light that curves. / Still, as the gypsies say, / good road." "The poems are set in a carefully articulated natural world, whose sensual beauty Pope captures in such lines as these from "Peaches": They will be all over the ground, / gold-dusted, giving softly / under the balls of our feet, / size of apricots, no good for eating, / but the smell will be / delicious." "Deborah Pope's poems give voice to a life deeply felt and fully realized, whose very personal visions yield universal claims. At the heart of this poetry's fanaticism is the search for the ground of intimacy and the configurations of identity. It is a measure of Pope's skill that each recognition seems powerfully right, not sought but given."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
