Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity

ISBN-13: 9780822341703 / Angielski / Miękka / 2008 / 362 str.

Nelson Maldonado Torres

Opis

Nelson Maldonado-Torres argues that European modernity has become inextricable from the experience of the warrior and conqueror. In Against War, he develops a powerful critique of modernity, and he offers a critical response combining ethics, political theory, and ideas rooted in Christian and Jewish thought. Maldonado-Torres focuses on the perspectives of those who inhabit the underside of western modernity, particularly Jewish, black, and Latin American theorists. He analyzes the works of the Jewish Lithuanian-French philosopher and religious thinker Emmanuel Levinas, the Martiniquean psychiatrist and political thinker Frantz Fanon, and the Catholic Argentinean-Mexican philosopher, historian, and theologian Enrique Dussel.Considering Levinas s critique of French liberalism and Nazi racial politics, and the links between them, Maldonado-Torres identifies a master morality of dominion and control at the heart of western modernity. This master morality constitutes the center of a warring paradigm that inspires and legitimizes racial policies, imperial projects, and wars of invasion. Maldonado-Torres refines the description of modernity s war paradigm and the Levinasian critique through Fanon s phenomenology of the colonized and racial self and the politics of decolonization, which he reinterprets in light of the Levinasian conception of ethics. Drawing on Dussel s genealogy of the modern imperial and warring self, Maldonado-Torres theorizes race as the naturalization of war s death ethic. He offers decolonial ethics and politics as an antidote to modernity s master morality and the paradigm of war. Against War advances the de-colonial turn, showing how theory and ethics cannot be conceived without politics, and how they all need to be oriented by the imperative of decolonization in the modern/colonial and postmodern world."