Description
Openness to change comes with risks, and the self-protective temptation to immunize oneself or one's community against these risks is strong. Yet without such risks, without openness to otherness, no encounter with the new, with difference, can ever take place. Without autoimmunity, theory becomes stagnant and programmatic, unable to receive and respond to the other or the event, to address, revise, and produce new meanings.
Taking up the challenge of thinking theory as skepticism, with and against philosophy, this study turns to literature as an interlocutor, investigating the ways theory, like the literary works of Montaigne, Baudelaire, Stendhal, Morrison, or Duras, declines to put on the interpretive brakes, to stop reading at a point of understanding. Undoing and remaking itself, theory-those critical interpretive practices that revel in the creation and proliferation of meaning-becomes autoimmune.
About the Author
Zahi Zalloua is the Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College. He is the author of Continental Philosophy and the Palestinian Question, Reading Unruly: Interpretation and its Ethical Demands, and Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism.
Book Information
ISBN 9780810137783
Author Zahi Zalloua
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Northwestern University Press
Publisher Northwestern University Press
Weight(grams) 335g
Dimensions(mm) 226mm * 152mm * 15mm