Description |
1 online resource (viii, 264 pages) |
Contents |
Sacrificial Victims: Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin -- Politics of Indifference: Reň Girard and Peter Sloterdijk -- Mediated Invisibility: Michael Haneke -- Apocalyptic Cosmologies: Christoph Ransmayr and Anselm Kiefer -- Melancholia Is Moot: Return to Freud -- Impoverishment and Feminization: Friederike Mayṟcker -- Television's Foreign Voices: Elfriede Jelinek -- A Domain of Sexual Struggle: Michel Houellebecq -- The Quest for the Sacred: Giorgio Agamben |
Summary |
This study analyzes the pervasive rhetoric of victimhood in European culture since 1968. In a radically fragmented public sphere, individuals perceive themselves as dissociated from all others, while at the same time they feel similar to everyone else. Where genuine solidarity and communality is attenuated, people present themselves as victims to garner media attention, create fragile social bonds, or escape supposed marginalization and oppression. Fatima Naqvi commences with interpretations of Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, arguing that contemporary discourse continues a trajectory mapped in the early 20th century?in the shadow of Nazism. In a series of paradigmatic readings of Reň Girard, Peter Sloterdijk, Michael Haneke, Anselm Kiefer, Christoph Ransmayr, Friederike Mayṟcker, Michel Houellebecq, Giorgio Agamben, and Elfriede Jelinek, she traces the on-going fascination with victimhood and the desire for victim status in the West. She looks at the way in which such cultural anxiety expresses itself; at how victim rhetoric calls itself into question; and, finally, at how it perpetuates itself in the moment that it becomes philosophically ungrounded |
Analysis |
Victim society Victimhood |
Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
Notes |
Print version record |
Subject |
Social perception -- Europe, Western
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Social psychology -- Europe, Western
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Victims in literature.
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Victims.
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Survivors
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Social & cultural anthropology.
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Behavioural theory (Behaviourism)
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Semantics.
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Cultural studies.
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Society.
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Victims in literature
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Social perception
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Social psychology
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Victims
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Western Europe
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Form |
Electronic book
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LC no. |
2006050185 |
ISBN |
1403975701 |
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9781403975706 |
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9780230603479 |
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0230603475 |
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1281363391 |
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9781281363398 |
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9781349536351 |
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1349536350 |
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