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Democratic Anarchy
Aesthetics and Political Resistance in U.S. Literature
Matthew Scully
- 256 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
Democratic Anarchy
Aesthetics and Political Resistance in U.S. Literature
Matthew Scully
About This Book
A dramatic and necessary rethinking of the meaning of Democracy Democratic Anarchy grapples with an uncomfortable but obvious truth inimical to democracy: both aesthetics and politics depend on the structuring antagonism of inclusion and exclusion. Yet in Democratic Anarchy, Matthew Scully asks, how can "the people" be represented in a way that acknowledges what remains unrepresentable? What would it mean to face up to the constitutive exclusions that haunt U.S. democracy and its anxious fantasies of equality?Synthesizing a broad range of theoretical traditions and interlocutorsâincluding Lacan, Rancière, Edelman, and Hartmanâ Democratic Anarchy polemically declares that there has never been, nor can there ever be, a realized democracy in the U.S. because democracy always depends on the hierarchical institution of a formal order by one part of the population over another. Engaging with an expansive corpus of American literature and art (Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louis Zukofsky, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nari Ward, Ocean Vuong, and Safiya Sinclair), Democratic Anarchy argues that many liberal concepts and institutions are in fact structurally opposed to democratic equality because they depend on regulating what can appear and in what form.By focusing on works that disrupt this regulatory impulse, Scully shows how rhetorical strateÂgies of interruption, excess, and disorder figure the anarchic equality that inegalitarian fantasies of democracy disavow. Democratic Anarchy develops a rigorous theory of equality that refuses to repeat the inequalities against which it positions itself, and it does so by turning to moments of resistanceâboth aesthetic and politicalâinaugurated by the equality that inheres in and antagoÂnizes the order of things.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Introduction: Democracyâs Death Drive
- Part I: Democratic Aesthetics
- Part II: Aestheticidal Resistance
- Coda: Disavowal and Figural Annihilation
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Abut the Author