• ISBN13: 9780199453726
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: Politics and Current Affairs
• Publisher: Oxford UP
• Publisher Imprint: Oxford UP
• Publication Date: December 12, 2015
• Pages: 336
• Original Price: INR 895.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 490 grams

How do we make sense of existence in a world that is constantly threatened by the destruction of ‘sense’? Exploring answers to this complex problem from multidisciplinary perspectives, this volume maintains that the question concerning the sense of existence and its destruction is essentially tied up with the question of violence: violence as a radical destruction of sense for and of existence. The contributors to this volume look into the ways in which violence derives legitimacy in the world, primarily through language and religion. Each essay negotiates with the politics of this legitimacy in a highly individual and irreducibly singular way. Going beyond the familiar model of questioning, the contributors argue that the place of violence in our contemporary historical condition has accelerated to an ever immeasurable state and demands urgent responses from intellectuals and activists alike. Table of Contents:Acknowledgements Introduction: The Weight of Violence Part I 1. On Violence: Mimesis, Death Instinct and Alterity 2. The Experience of Silence: Derrida and the Language of Negative Theology 3. Stupidity, Madness and Malevolence: Schelling, Deleuze, Flaubert and Musil and the Problem of Violence 4. ‘No Eye has Seen it’: The Renewal of the Human Condition in Marx and Lévinas 5. The Necessity for Clean Air and Space is Stronger than Any Kind of Hatred: An Essay on the Concept of Violence and Religion in Walter Benjamin 6. Tears Are Not Yet Wiped Away on All Faces 7. The Concrete Violence of History and the Apocalyptic Messianic Dwarf 8. Kingdom-Come: Eschatology and Apocalypse 9. Capital Violence 10. St. Paul, Gabriel Naudé, Antonin Artaud: Three Violent and Delicate Exceptions to Law and Liturgy Part II 11. Roots of Violence: Life and Other Things 12. Violence of/on Languages: The Political Topography of Linguistic Nationalism 13 The Violence of Linguistic Cosmopolitanism 14. Carving Out a Region Beyond: Religious Violence in Partition Narratives 15. Conflict as a Site for Perpetuation of Traditional Values Index Editors and Contributors

Saitya Brata Das teaches at the Center for English Studies, School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Soumyabrata Choudhury teaches at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.