The Reject
Community, Politics, and Religion After the Subject
Published on 15. October 2014
Book
Hardback
384 pages
978-0-8232-6268-7 (ISBN)
Description
This book proposes a theory of the reject, a more adequate figure than the subject for thinking friendship, love, community, democracy, the postsecular, and the posthuman.
Through close readings of Nancy, Deleuze, Derrida, Cixous, Clement, Bataille, Balibar, Ranciere, and Badiou, Goh shows how the reject has always been nascent in contemporary French thought. The recent turn to animals and bare life, as well as the rise of the Occupy movement, he argues, presents a special urgency to think the reject today.
Thinking the reject most importantly helps to advance our commitment to affirm others without acculturating their differences. But the reject also offers, Goh proposes, a response finally commensurate with the radical horizon of Nancy's question of who comes after the subject.
Through close readings of Nancy, Deleuze, Derrida, Cixous, Clement, Bataille, Balibar, Ranciere, and Badiou, Goh shows how the reject has always been nascent in contemporary French thought. The recent turn to animals and bare life, as well as the rise of the Occupy movement, he argues, presents a special urgency to think the reject today.
Thinking the reject most importantly helps to advance our commitment to affirm others without acculturating their differences. But the reject also offers, Goh proposes, a response finally commensurate with the radical horizon of Nancy's question of who comes after the subject.
Reviews / Votes
"Subject, Eject, Reject, Project: 'ject' is the theme, the tone, the issue. Irving Goh understands perfectly the jection without any kind of junction, recognizing that what remains to be thought is just some ject-society or community. In reading The Reject, one begins to join the unjoinable." -- -Jean-Luc Nancy "This book is a rigorous examination of the problems surrounding the returns to/of the subject that have occurred under the motley banner of "French Theory." Closely tracking the discourses of Deleuze, Derrida, and Nancy, the author convincingly argues that what we need today is a better strategy of re-jection. I couldn't agree more!" -- -Gregg Lambert Syracuse University "A highly ambitious, theoretically engaged, and timely response to several strands in recent French philosophical and intellectual thought." -- -Philip Armstrong The Ohio State University "In this ambitious and spirited book Irving Goh traverses a great swath of recent French thought." -Critical Inquiry "In The Reject, Irving Goh not only traces the persistent presence of the subject in the work of Badiou ("the faithful subject of the event"), Ranciere ("the uncounted subject"), Balibar ("the citizen-subject"), Rosi Braidotti ("the critical post-human subject"), and Katherine Hayles ("the flickering post-human subject"), he also provides clear and reasonable arguments as to why this presence poses serious problems for their respective attempts to think community, democracy, religion, love, friendship, the post-secular, and the post-human in wholly new ways...Goh offers one of the most rigorous and carefully articulated responses to the question 'who comes after the subject'" -- -John Paul Ricco L'Esprit Createur (56.3)More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 27 mm
Weight
773 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8232-6268-7 (9780823262687)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
10/2014
1st Edition
Fordham University Press
€25.49
Available for download
Person
Irving Goh is Associate Professor of Literature at the National University of Singapore. He is the author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject (Fordham University Press, 2014), which won the MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Best Book in French and Francophone Studies. His second monograph, L'existence prepositionnelle, was published by Galilee in 2019. With Jean-Luc Nancy, he published The Deconstruction of Sex (Duke University Press, 2021). He is also editor of French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK (Routledge, 2019), coeditor with Verena Andermatt Conley of Nancy Now (Polity, 2014), and coeditor with Timothy Murray of the diacritics special issue on "The Prepositional Senses of Jean-Luc Nancy" (2 volumes, 2014-15).
Content
Preface: A Book for Everyone Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: Let's Drop the Subject 1 2. (After) Friendship, Love, and Community 3. The Reject and the "Post-Secular," or Who's Afraid of Religion 4. Prolegomenon to Reject Politics: From Voyous to Becoming-Animal 5. Clinamen, or the Auto-Reject for "Posthuman" Futures 6. Conclusion: Incompossibility, Being-in-Common, Abandonment, and the Auto-Reject Notes Bibliography Index