Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism (Lit Z)

Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism (Lit Z)

by Lindsay Turner (Translator), Frédéric Neyrat (Author), Lindsay Turner (Translator), Lindsay Turner (Translator), Steven Shaviro (Foreword), Walt Hunter (Translator)

Synopsis

This book offers a manifesto for a radical existentialism aiming to regenerate the place of the outside that contemporary theory underestimates. Neyrat calls this outside atopia : not utopia, a dreamt place out of the world where everything would be perfect, but atopia, the internal outside that is at the core of every being. Atopia is neither an object that an object-oriented ontology would be able to formalize, nor the matter that new materialisms could identify. Atopia is what constitutes the existence of any object or subject, its singularity or more precisely its eccentricity. Etymologically, to exist means to be outside and the book argues that every entity is outside, thrown in the world, wandering without any ontological anchor. In this regard, a radicalized existentialism does not privilege human beings (as Sartre and Heidegger did), but considers existence as a universal condition that concerns every being.

It is important to offer a radical existentialism because the current denial of the outside is politically, and aesthetically, damaging. Only an atopian philosophy-a bizarre, extravagant, heretic philosophy-can care for our fear of the outside. For therapeutic element, a radical existentialism favors everything that challenges the compact immanence in which we are trapped, losing capacity to imagine political alternatives. To sustain these alternatives, the book identifies the atopia as a condition of the possibility to break immanence and analyze these breaks in human and animal subjectivity, language, politics and metaphysics.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 112
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 03 Oct 2017

ISBN 10: 0823277569
ISBN 13: 9780823277568

Media Reviews
Everything is in flux, as we are told over and over again. And yet, these are fluxes in which nothing ever really changes... Other thinkers have characterized globalized and financialized capitalism in this way; Neyrat sees it as a dilemma for critical thought as well... In a world where anything can be anyplace, and anything can switch places with anything else, philosophy must insist on its power to be, not everyplace, but noplace. It must never fit in, but always disturb its context, ... maintaining a relation with the very Outside that our dominant social, economic, and intellectual conditions seek to deny or suppress... Above all, Atopias is a work of ethics, exhorting us to recognize and find room for the many forms of existence with whom we share our planet. -- -from Steven Shaviro's Foreword
Author Bio
Frederic Neyrat (Author)
Frederic Neyrat is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of a dozen books in French on philosophy and environmental humanities.
Steven Shaviro (Foreword By)
Steven Shaviro is DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University.
Walt Hunter (Translator)
Walt Hunter is Assistant Professor of World Literature at Clemson University. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic, College Literature, Jacket2, Modern Philology, the minnesota review, symploke, Viewpoint, and elsewhere. He is the co-translator, with Lindsay Turner, of Frederic Neyrat's Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism (Fordham University Press, 2017).
Lindsay Turner (Translator)
Lindsay Turner is a poet and translator and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia.