Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman
Cambridge University Press, 2/22/2018
EAN 9781108420921, ISBN10: 1108420923
Hardcover, 276 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
Studies of the writing of Herman Melville are often divided among those that address his political, historical, or biographical dimensions and those that offer creative theoretical readings of his texts. In Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, Michael Jonik offers a series of nuanced and ambitious philosophical readings of Melville that unite these varied approaches. Through a careful reconstruction of Melville's interaction with philosophy, Jonik argues that Melville develops a notion of the 'inhuman' after Spinoza's radically non-anthropocentric and relational thought. Melville's own political philosophy, in turn, actively disassembles differences between humans and nonhumans, and the animate and inanimate. Jonik has us rethink not only how we read Melville, but also how we understand our deeply inhuman condition.
Introduction
Melville's inhumanities
1. 'The constituents of a chaos'
character, materiality and ethopolitics in Moby-Dick
2. A geology of murmurs
Pierre's inhuman transformations
3. Outlandish beings, outlandish politics
'The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles'
4. Misanthropology
commonality and its discontents in The Confidence-Man
5. 'Where wild rocks are set'
character and the space of Clarel
6. Form, relation, and dissolution in Melville's later poetry
Coda
impulsive Billy Budd.