Tolerance: A Sensorial Orientation to Politics

ISBN-13: 9780199315819 / Angielski / Miękka / 2013 / 208 str.

Lars Tnder

Opis

In Tolerance, Lars Tonder offers a thought-provoking theory on what tolerance means in pluralistic societies. Tonder begins by showing the limitations of the way democratic theory currently understands tolerance: either as a form of restraint or as benevolence, but always divorced from what it is that the tolerant person really senses. According to Tonder, what is missing from current theories of tolerance is the idea of pain, or the lived experience of what it means to become tolerant. Introducing what he calls a "sensorial orientation to politics" and a "theory of active tolerance," he argues that the act of becoming tolerant (and the reasoning it entails) depends on sensing the world in an expansive manner attentive to the new and unforeseen. In order to illustrate, he engages with a number of theorists, from Seneca, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Marcuse to Locke, Kant and Mill, and he draws upon a wide range of examples, including the 2005 controversy over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs, Dave Chappelle's comedy, and methods of torture used in the war on terror. Tolerance is at once a sweeping account of the history of political thought and an invitation to rethink the meaning of tolerance within the sensorial conditions that define twenty first century democratic politics.

Recenzje

Tonder's Tolerance makes an extraordinary and subtle claim: our rationalizations and justifications of tolerance can never live up to the felt burden of toleration. Rather than the proliferation of passive reasons that anaesthetize the lived experiences of everyday encounters, Tolerance calls for a 'sensorial reasoning' that attends to the trials, tribulations, and especially pains, that call forth a disposition of toleration. Masterfully argued engaging both contemporary and historical sources, as well as explorations of current events including the Danish cartoon war, Tonder has given us nothing less than a transvaluation of one of the most important - and urgent - concepts of modern political thought.

O autorze

Lars Tønder is an assistant professor in political theory at Northwestern University.