The Lucid Vigil: Deconstruction, Desire and the Politics of Critique (Psychoanalytic Political Theory)

Winner of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy 2020 Annual Symposium Book Award 
Stella Gaon provides the first fully philosophical account of the critical nature of deconstruction, and she does so by turning in an original way to psychoanalysis. Drawing on close readings of Freud and Laplanche, Gaon argues that Derridean deconstruction is driven by a normative investment in reason’s psychological force. Indeed, deconstruction is more faithful to the principle of reason than the various forms of critical theory prevalent today. For if one pursues the classical demand for rational grounds vigilantly, one finds that claims to ethical or political legitimacy cannot be rationally justified, because they are undone by logical undecidability. Gaon’s argument is borne out in the cases of Kantian deontology, Deweyan pragmatism, progressive pedagogy, Habermasian moral theory, Levinasian ethics and others. What emerges is the groundbreaking demonstration that deconstruction is impelled by a quasi-ethical critical drive, and that to read deconstructively is to radicalize the emancipatory practice of reason as self-critique. 
This important volume will be of great value to critical theorists as well as to Derrida scholars and researchers in social and political thought.

Politics & Social Sciences

Gaon, Stella

Philosophy

Routledge

This volume explores the political implications of violence and alterity (radical difference) for the very practice of democracy, and reformulates the possibility of community that democracy is said to imply. Most significantly, contributors intervene in traditional democratic theory by boldly contesting the widely-held assumption that increased inclusion, tolerance, and cultural recognition are democracy’s sufficient conditions. Rather than simply inquiring how best to expand the "demos," they investigate how claims to self-determination, identity and sovereignty are a problem for democracy and how, paradoxically, alterity may be its greatest strength.  Drawing largely on the Left, continental tradition, contributions include an appeal to the tension between fear and love in the face of anti-Semitism in Poland, an injunction to rethink the identity-difference binary that dominates liberal-democratic thought, a critique of the canonical, democratic "we," and a call for an ethics and a politics of "dissensus" in democratic struggles against racist and sexist oppression. The authors thus mobilize some of the most powerful critical insights emerging across the social sciences and humanities -- from anthropology, critical legal studies, critical race theory and post-colonial studies, Marxism, psychoanalysis, social and political thought, philosophy and sociology -- to reconsider the meaning and possibility of "democracy" in the face of its contemporary crisis. The book directly appeal to students and scholars interested in cutting-edge, critical reflection on the empirical phenomenon of increased violence in the West provoked by radical difference, and on the possibility of radical, political-theoretical critique.

Democracy in crisis: Violence, alterity, community (Perspectives on Democratic Practice)

Social Sciences

Manchester University Press

Stella Gaon provides the first fully philosophical account of the critical nature of deconstruction, and she does so by turning in an original way to psychoanalysis. Drawing on close readings of Freud and Laplanche, Gaon argues that Derridean deconstruction is driven by a normative investment in reason’s psychological force. Indeed, deconstruction is more faithful to the principle of reason than the various forms of critical theory prevalent today. For if one pursues the classical demand for rational grounds vigilantly, one finds that claims to ethical or political legitimacy cannot be rationally justified, because they are undone by logical undecidability. Gaon’s argument is borne out in the cases of Kantian deontology, Deweyan pragmatism, progressive pedagogy, Habermasian moral theory, Levinasian ethics and others. What emerges is the groundbreaking demonstration that deconstruction is impelled by a quasi-ethical critical drive, and that to read deconstructively is to radicalize the emancipatory practice of reason as self-critique. This important volume will be of great value to critical theorists as well as to Derrida scholars and researchers in social and political thought.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gaon, Stella. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gaon, Stella

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gaon, Stella. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Lucid Vigil: Deconstruction, Desire and the Politics of Critique (Psychoanalytic Political Theory)

Democracy in crisis: Violence, alterity, community (Perspectives on Democratic Practice)

The Lucid Vigil: Deconstruction, Desire and the Politics of Critique (Psychoanalytic Political Theory)