A Politics of the Ordinary

Reviews / Votes

"An untimely book in the best sense of that term. While others announce the solidity of common sense and the necessity of moral certainty, Thomas dumm explores the mysterious indeterminancy of ordinary life itself. Along the way he reveals how important this very indeterminancy is to politics and ethics. And his compelling engagement with thinkers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Cavell, and Deleuze illuminates the place of the extrordinary within the ordinary." - William Connolly "The apparent excesses in Emerson's and Thoreau's voices may be heard as efforts, addressed first to themselves, not to give in to a madness of despair over, and yet of hope for, an American democracy, a new world. Tom Dumm's politics of the ordinary responds with mutually modifying ideas of the political and of ordinary life in which the ordinary is not one more order, violently conformed to, but the name of any time at which our desires for a better world find new chances of expression, and habitation. To provide such encounters of effective surprise requires a capacious interest in the unmarked eventfulness of the world, in the ways we ornament, perhaps in a choice of song, our getting along, and in posing awakening explorations and juxtapositions of textsmatters that Tom Dumm's sometimes narrative, sometimes pedagogical, sometimes lyrical, always risky prose asks of itself, and receives." - Stanley Cavell