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Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative - Tapa blanda

Taussig, Michael

 
9780804732000: Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative
Tapa blanda
ISBN 10: 0804732000 ISBN 13: 9780804732000
Editorial: Stanford University Press, 1999

Sinopsis

Defacement asks what happens when something precious is despoiled. In specifying the human face as the ideal type for thinking through such violation, this book raises the issue of secrecy as the depth that seems to surface with the tearing of surface.

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Acerca del autor

Michael Taussig is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author, most recently, of The Magic of the State.

De la contraportada

Defacement asks what happens when something precious is despoiled. It begins with the notion that such activity is attractive in its very repulsion, and that it creates something sacred even in the most secular of societies and circumstances. In specifying the human face as the ideal type for thinking through such violation, this book raises the issue of secrecy as the depth that seems to surface with the tearing of surface. This surfacing is made all the more subtle and ingenious, not to mention everyday, by the deliberately partial exposures involved in “the public secret”—defined as what is generally known but, for one reason or another, cannot easily be articulated.
Arguing that this sort of knowledge (“knowing what not to know”) is the most powerful form of social knowledge, Taussig works with ideas and motifs from Nietzsche, William Burroughs, Elias Canetti, Georges Bataille, and the ethnography of unmasking in so-called primitive societies in order to extend his earlier work on mimesis and transgression. Underlying his concern with defacement and the public secret is the search for a mode of truth telling that unmasks, but only to reenchant, thereby underlining Walter Benjamin’s notion that “truth is not a matter of exposure of the secret, but a revelation that does justice to it.”

De la solapa interior

Defacement asks what happens when something precious is despoiled. It begins with the notion that such activity is attractive in its very repulsion, and that it creates something sacred even in the most secular of societies and circumstances. In specifying the human face as the ideal type for thinking through such violation, this book raises the issue of secrecy as the depth that seems to surface with the tearing of surface. This surfacing is made all the more subtle and ingenious, not to mention everyday, by the deliberately partial exposures involved in the public secretdefined as what is generally known but, for one reason or another, cannot easily be articulated.
Arguing that this sort of knowledge (knowing what not to know) is the most powerful form of social knowledge, Taussig works with ideas and motifs from Nietzsche, William Burroughs, Elias Canetti, Georges Bataille, and the ethnography of unmasking in so-called primitive societies in order to extend his earlier work on mimesis and transgression. Underlying his concern with defacement and the public secret is the search for a mode of truth telling that unmasks, but only to reenchant, thereby underlining Walter Benjamins notion that truth is not a matter of exposure of the secret, but a revelation that does justice to it.

"Sobre este título" puede pertenecer a otra edición de este libro.

Editorial
Stanford University Press
Año de publicación
1999
Idioma
Inglés
ISBN 10 
0804732000
ISBN 13 
9780804732000
Encuadernación
Tapa blanda
Número de páginas
328
Contacto del fabricante
no disponible
Persona responsable
no disponible