Bureaucratic Fanatics

Modern Literature and the Passions of Rationalization
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-3-11-059519-2
Verlag: De Gruyter

Buch, Englisch, 272 Seiten, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 581 g

Reihe: ISSN

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.

Zielgruppe

Scholars of Literary Studies, Political Theory, Critical Theory

Autoren/Hrsg.

Robinson, Benjamin Lewis

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen

Über Autor(innen)

Benjamin Lewis Robinson, University of Vienna, Austria.