Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right

by Timothy Brennan

Overview

Taking stock of contemporary social, cultural, and political currents, Timothy Brennan explores key turning points in the recent history of American intellectual life. He contends that a certain social-democratic vision of politics has been banished from public discussion, leading to an unlikely convergence of the political right and the academic left and a deadening of critical opposition. Brennan challenges the conventional view that affiliations based on political belief, claims upon the state, or the public interest have been rendered obsolete by the march of events in the years before and after Reagan. Instead, he lays out a new path for a future infused with a sense of intellectual and political possibility.

In highlighting the shift in America's intellectual culture, Brennan makes the case for seeing belief as an identity. As much as race or ethnicity, political belief, Brennan argues, is itself an identity-one that remains unrecognized and without legal protections while possessing its own distinctive culture. Brennan also champions the idea of cosmopolitanism and critiques those theorists who relegate the left to the status of postcolonial "other."

Wars of Position documents how alternative views were chased from the public stage by strategic acts of censorship, including within supposedly dissident wings of the humanities. He explores how the humanities entered the cultural and political mainstream and settled into an awkward secular religion of the "middle way." In a series of interrelated chapters, Brennan considers narratives of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Clinton impeachment; reexamines Salman Rushdie's pre-fatwa writing to illuminate its radical social leanings; presents a startling new interpretation of Edward Said; looks at the fatal reception of Antonio Gramsci within postcolonial history and criticism; and offers a stinging critique of Hardt and Negri's Empire and the influence of Italian radicalism on contemporary cultural theory. Throughout the work, Brennan also draws on and critiques the ideas and influence of Heidegger, Lyotard, Kristeva, and other influential theorists.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231137300
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	01/11/2006
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Timothy Brennan is a cultural critic and biographer. He is Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Minnesota and the author of, most recently, Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz, Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies, and Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Cultures of Belief
Part 1. Belief and Its Discontents
1. The Barbaric Left
2. Nativism
3. Humanism, Philology, and Imperialism
4. Globalization's Unlikely Champions
Part 2. The Anarchist Sublime
5. The Organizational Imaginary
6. The Empire's New Clothes
7. Cosmo-Theory
8. The Southern Intellectual
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

David Harvey

A major contribution to the regeneration of critical theory. A compelling indictment of how the cultural left, in a fit of narcissistic self-regard and self-referentiality, abandoned all politics and purpose in the 1980s and 1990s, thereby leaving open the way for free-market triumphalism and the neoliberal ethic to dominate public discourse.

— David Harvey, CUNY, author of Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography

Neil Lazarus

Wars of Position is an outstanding work, bracing and provocative in its polemical aspect, erudite and compelling in its argumentative thrust, heterodox, incisive, and consistently illuminating in its intellectual performance.

— Neil Lazarus, University of Warwick, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies

Ania Loomba

Passionate, provocative, and incisive, Wars of Position challenges us to re-examine the politics of the academy. Making a compelling case for putting political belief at the center of discussions about identity, culture and belonging, Brennan offers persuasive re-evaluations of the intellectual and political affiliations of leading theorists, writers and thinkers of our day. The 'culture of belief' challenges many received truths about critical theory, the U.S. academy, postcolonial studies and globalization.

— Ania Loomba, University of Pennsylvania, author of Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism

Susan Buck-Morss

Brennan hits at the soft underbelly of the Left intelligentsia, arguing that its pet theories -- poststructuralism, postcolonialism, identity-construction, bio-power -- have largely abandoned democratic politics as a public practice. His attack sweeps across the big names in critical theory since the Reagan era, and few are left standing. Declaring with intelligence and boldness what many have been thinking, the book is a breath of fire-and fresh air.

— Susan Buck-Morss, Cornell University, author of Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left

Editorial Reviews

Brennan's vigorously interrogative style dramatizes an unsettling yet productive skepticism, a sobering homeopathic injection into the current euphoria about the possibilities of globalization.

American Book Review

An important book.

Interventions

A rich and erudite account of recent struggles among Euro-American intellectuals concerning cultural theory... Highly recommended.

Choice

Throughout Wars of Position, Brennan exhibits a remarkable knowledge of theoretical and historical traditions, and an ability to move across them with deftness,fluently summarizing deeply complex arguments.

— Joseph Keith

Postmodern Culture

Throughout Wars of Position, Brennan exhibits a remarkable knowledge of theoretical and historical traditions, and an ability to move across them with deftness,fluently summarizing deeply complex arguments.

Postmodern Culture - Joseph Keith