Tracing Global Democracy : : Literature, Theory, and the Politics of Trauma / / Vladimir Biti.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG Plus DeG Package 2016 Part 1
• VerfasserIn: Biti, Vladimir,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2016]; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: Culture & Conflict , 7
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (IX, 394 p.)

Focused on the recently hotly debated topic at the crossroads of various human and social sciences, this book investigates the emergence of the cosmopolitan idea of literature and its impact on the reconfiguration of the European and non-European political spaces. The birthplace of this idea is its designers’ traumatic experience as induced by the disconcerting condition of their abode.The thesis is that the eighteenth and nineteenth century’s cosmopolitan projects that grow out of such deep frustrations trace the twentieth century’s global democracy. This hidden origin of cosmopolitan projects dismantles the usual European representation of modernization as universal progress as myopic. Rather than being a generous action of prominent subjects such as Voltaire, Kant, and Goethe, or Bakhtin, Derrida and Deleuze, cosmopolitanism is an enforced reaction of the instances dispossessed by injury that search for the ways of healing it. Yet as soon as their remedy establishes itself as the ground for universal reconciliation, it risks suppressing other’s trauma, i.e. turns from politics into a police. Articulating the author’s position in the recent debates on the structure of democracy, the epilogue suggests an alternative strategy.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Introduction: The Cosmopolitan Axis: Agencies and/or Enablers -- Part I: Toward a Global Community: The Emergence of the Modern Idea of Literature -- 1. The Divided Legacy of the Republic of Letters: Emancipation and Trauma -- 2. The Fissured Identity of Literature: National Universalism and/or Cosmopolitan Nationalism -- 3. The Janus Face of Literary Bildung: Education and/or Self-Formation? -- 4. Who Voices Universal History? Kant’s “Mankind” and/or Herder’s “Nature” -- 5. Who Worlds the Literature? Goethe’s Weltliteratur and Globalization -- Part II: An Observer under Observation: The Cosmopolitan Legacy of Modern Theory -- 6. Interiorizing the Exteriority: The Cosmopolitan Authorization of the Theoretical Truth -- 7. The Narrative of Permanent Displacement: Early German Romanticism and Its Theoretical Afterlife -- 8. The Oppositional Literary Transcendental: The Russian Formalist Rewriting of Early Romanticist Cosmopolitanism -- 9. The All-Devouring Modern Mind: Bakhtin’s Cosmopolitan Self -- 10. Countering the Empirical Evidence: From Immigrant Cosmopolitanism to a Cosmopolitanism of the Disregarded -- 11. Political and/or Literary Community: From Class to Messianic Cosmopolitanism -- 12. Literature as Deterritorialization: New Vistas for Democracy? -- Epilogue: The Practice of Recommencing: Toward a Cosmopolitanism of the Dispossessed Belonging -- References -- Index