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book: Democratic Anarchy
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Democratic Anarchy

Aesthetics and Political Resistance in U.S. Literature
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2024

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 interlocutors—including Lacan, Rancière, Edelman, and Hartman—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 strate­gies 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 resistance—both aesthetic and political—inaugurated by the equality that inheres in and antago­nizes the order of things.

∙ An important intervention into the question of who counts and to what extent, which is one of the most urgent topics today in literary studies, political theory, and social reality.

Author / Editor information

Contributor: Matthew Scully Matthew Scully is Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of Lausanne. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including the Journal of Modern Literature, Diacritics, African American Review, American Literature, Critical Inquiry, and Postmodern Culture.

Reviews

Matthew Scully’s Democratic Anarchy is a fascinating and provocative exploration of American literature in relation to democratic politics. --- All readers of Scully. . . will find their certainties questioned, their convictions probed, and should relish seeing their favorite literary touchstones re-illuminated in the strobe light of political relevance and political impotence. --- Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière in particular, Democratic Anarchy offers a compelling theory of democracy and an incisive critique of consensus politics in the United States. Its sharp rhetorical readings of diverse examples of US literature draw out a vision of radical equality beyond the limits of representation.---Christian P. Haines, author of A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary Commons

Topics

  • Publicly Available

    Frontmatter

    i
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  • Publicly Available

    Contents

    vii
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    Introduction: Democracy’s Death Drive

    1
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    Part I Democratic Aesthetics

    37
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    Part II Aestheticidal Resistance

    111
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    Coda: Disavowal and Figural Annihilation

    179
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    Acknowledgments

    183
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    Notes

    187
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    Bibliography

    239
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    Index

    261
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
July 3, 2024
eBook ISBN:
9781531507091
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781531507091
eBook ISBN: 9781531507091
Keywords for this book
Democracy; Anarchy; Politics; Aesthetics; American Literature; Equality; Psychoanalysis; Dissensus; Antagonism
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
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