By F. Naqvi
This examine analyzes the pervasive rhetoric of victimhood in eu tradition seeing that 1968. In a significantly fragmented public sphere, members understand themselves as dissociated from all others, whereas while they believe just like every body else. the place real harmony and communality is attenuated, humans current themselves as sufferers to garner media awareness, create fragile social bonds, or get away intended marginalization and oppression. Fatima Naqvi commences with interpretations of Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, arguing that modern discourse keeps a trajectory mapped within the early twentieth century--in the shadow of Nazism. In a sequence of paradigmatic readings of Ren? Girard, Peter Sloterdijk, Michael Haneke, Anselm Kiefer, Christoph Ransmayr, Friederike Mayr?cker, Michel Houellebecq, Giorgio Agamben, and Elfriede Jelinek, she lines the on-going fascination with victimhood and the need for sufferer prestige within the West. She appears to be like on the means within which such cultural anxiousness expresses itself; at how sufferer rhetoric calls itself into query; and, eventually, at the way it perpetuates itself within the second that it turns into philosophically ungrounded.
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Additional resources for The Literary and Cultural Rhetoric of Victimhood: Western Europe, 1970-2005
Sample text
Se oggi non vi è piú una figura predeterminabile dell’uomo sacro, è, forse, perché siamo tutti virtualmente homines sacri. [126–27]) It is worth noting that this argument’s “line of flight” is a properly modern one. Agamben returns not only to Foucault’s notion of biopower in Homo sacer, but also to Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, Martin Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt. In my reflections, I certainly do not mean to propose that there would and could not have been alternative routes into the topic of victim society.
While all potential victims can be subsumed under the single category of expendability, the more severe dedifferentiation attaches itself to the victimizers. This, in my view, is the ostensible reason for violence and Opfer, rather than the victims’ willing or unwilling, witting or unwitting participation within a socio-cultural dynamic prone to the language of faith. Girard’s views of contemporary society, which arise out of his indifference toward actual or construed victims, are, to be sure, of a conservative cast (a reputation that his Biblical exegesis has only solidified).
By harping on the cultish element of culture throughout the text, Sloterdijk unintentionally affirms the democratic perspective on difference against which he is writing, where difference is considered a transcendental absolute. Sloterdijk, in contrast to Girard, focuses less on ‘indifferentiation’ per se than on the emotional effects of societal dedifferentiation. For him, we have already reached the stage where the public sphere is riven by the lack of meaningful difference, a phase that Girard to some extent still anticipates.