225 pages

English

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World of Becoming , livre ebook

Duke University Press - Connolly William E. Connolly

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225 pages

English

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In A World of Becoming William E. Connolly outlines a political philosophy suited to a world whose powers of creative evolution include and exceed the human estate. This is a world composed of multiple interacting systems, including those of climate change, biological evolution, economic practices, and geological formations. Such open systems, set on different temporal registers of stability and instability, periodically resonate together to produce profound, unpredictable changes. To engage such a world reflectively is to feel pressure to alter established practices of politics, ethics, and spirituality. In pursuing such a course, Connolly draws inspiration from philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze, as well as the complexity theorist of biology Stuart Kauffman and the theologian Catherine Keller.Attunement to a world of becoming, Connolly argues, may help us address dangerous resonances between global finance capital, cross-regional religious resentments, neoconservative ideology, and the 24-hour mass media. Coming to terms with subliminal changes in the contemporary experience of time that challenge traditional images can help us grasp how these movements have arisen and perhaps even inspire creative counter-movements. The book closes with the chapter "The Theorist and the Seer," in which Connolly draws insights from early Greek ideas of the Seer and a Jerry Lewis film, The Nutty Professor, to inform the theory enterprise today.

Informations

Publié par	Duke University Press
Date de parution	17 janvier 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780822393511
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1348€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

A World of Becoming

A John Hope Franklin Center Book

A World of Becoming

William E. Connolly

d u k e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s Durham & London 2011

∫2011 Duke University Press

Printed in the United States

of America on acid-free paper$

Typeset in Carter + Cone Galliard by

Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data appear on the last

printed page of this book.

To my graduate students,

past and present.

Chapter 1.

Chapter 2.

Chapter 3.

Chapter 4.

Chapter 5.

Chapter 6.

Contents

Prelude, 1

Complexity, Agency, and Time, 17

The Vicissitudes of Experience, 43

Belief, Spirituality, and Time, 68

Interlude, 93

The Human Predicament, 97

Capital Flows, Sovereign Decisions, and World Resonance Machines, 124

The Theorist and the Seer, 148

Postlude, 176

Acknowledgments, 178

Notes, 181

Bibliography, 199

Index, 205

Prelude

In the closing scene of the Coen Brothers’ ﬁlm,Barton Fink, a young woman in a bathing suit strolls down a beach. Barton Fink, a frustrated young screen-writer, who has spent too much time talking to a man who turned out to be a psychotic killer, walks toward her carrying a box just large enough to contain a severed head. Barton may not know what is in the box. The woman sits down on the sand, exchanging a few words with Barton, who replies politely. She then turns toward the ocean, leaning on her left arm with her right hand cupped above her eyes. The scene freezes, but the waves continue to break onto the shore. The visual image soon dissolves and the sound of the waves lingers a moment longer before the credits roll. The ﬁnal scene recalls a crude painting of the woman in that same arrested pose, which had hung on the wall of the writer’s dingy room. That picture had been too ordinary for Barton or us to note. He had been unable to write a script about ordinary people, because he could not relate to them, a failing exhibited by his unwillingness to listen to the crazy guy in the next room who was ready to ﬁll him full of tales about the derangements of ordinary life. ‘‘I could tell you lots of stories,’’ the strange, a√able neighbor would say before Fink would interrupt him to recount his desire to break his writer’s block by engaging ordinary life. That postcard painting had peered at us from time to time, and at the writer too, as he stared through it in the struggle to compose a sentence. It just hung there, in a ﬁlm at once satirical about Hollywood and elemental in its presentation of life. As the credits roll, we the viewers are now drawn back to that painting as a ﬁgure of arrested movement. On its surface the waves are frozen in mid-motion; even the froth at the top of each is arrested. There is no sound. The woman’s face and eyes are ﬁxed in an immobile gaze. The muscles holding her left arm in the pose are locked in place, as are those in her legs, stomach, shoulders, and buttocks. The gentle breeze kicking up a few grains of sand has stopped, holding the grains in midair. The woman’s breath, pulse, per-