Bureaucratic Fanatics
About this book
Is justice only achievable by means of bureaucratization or might it first arrive with the end of bureaucracy? Bureaucratic Fanatics shows how this ever more contentious question in contemporary politics belongs to the political-theological underpinnings of bureaucratization itself.
At the end of the 18th century, a new and paradoxical kind of fanaticism emerged - rational fanaticism - that propelled the intensive biopolitical management of everyday life in Europe and North America as well as the extensive colonial exploitation of the earth and its peoples. These excesses of bureaucratization incited in turn increasingly fanatical forms of resistance. And they inspired literary production that provocatively presented the outrageous contours of rationalization. Combining political theory with readings of Kleist, Melville, Conrad, and Kafka, this genealogy of bureaucratic fanaticism relates two extreme figures: fanatical bureaucrats driven to the ends of the earth and to the limits of humanity by the rationality of the apparatuses they serve; and peculiar fanatics who passionately, albeit seemingly passively, resist the encroachments of bureaucratization.
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Topics
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Frontmatter
I -
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Contents
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Acknowledgments
XI -
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Introduction
1 -
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1. Bureaucratic Fanaticism
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2. A New Kind of Schwärmer: Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas
35 -
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3. Architecture of the Office: Melville’s Bartleby
75 -
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4. Abstraction of the Earth: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
102 -
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5. Poverty of Agency: Conrad’s The Secret Agent
130 -
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6. State of Embarrassment: Kafka’s In the Penal Colony
157 -
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7. Society of Security: Kafka’s The Metamorphosis
185 -
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Epilogue: Guerrilla / Gardener Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K
219 -
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Bibliography
245 -
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Index
262
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