The extreme in contemporary culture : states of vulnerability / Pramod K. Nayar.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Nayar, Pramod K., author.

Series:

Critical perspectives on theory, culture and politics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Excess (Philosophy)--Social aspects.

Excess (Philosophy).

Extremists.

Civilization, Modern.

Social aspects.

Physical Description:

xxiii, 165 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : Rowman & Littlefield International, [2017]

Summary:

This is a study of vulnerability as a dominant cultural discourse today, especially as it manifests in 'extreme cultures'. These are cultural practices and representations of humans in risky, painful or life-threatening conditions where the limits of their humanity are tested, and producing heightened sensations of pain and pleasure. Extreme cultures in this book signal the social ontology of humans where, in specific conditions, vulnerability becomes helplessness. We see in these cultures the exploitation of the body's immanent vulnerability in involuntary conditions of torture or deprivation, the encounter with extreme situations where the body is rendered incapacitated from performing routine functions due to structural conditions or in a voluntary embracing of risk in sporting events wherein the body pits itself against enormous forces and conditions. The book studies vulnerability across various conditions: torture, disease, accident. It studies spaces of vulnerability and helplessness, the aesthetics and representations of vulnerability, the extreme in the everyday and, finally, the witnessing of (in)human extremes. Extreme cultures suggest shared precarity as a foundational condition of humanity. A witness culture emerges through the cultural discourse of vulnerability, the representations of the victim and/or survivor, and the accounts of witnesses. They offer, in short, an entire new way of speaking about and classifying the human.

Contents:

1 Spaces of the Extreme 1

(Im)mobility as Vulnerability 2

Vulnerability's Corporeal 'Ground Zero' 9

The Extreme and Ruin Spaces 11

Non-Places and Extreme Invisibility 18

Spaces of Extreme Sensation 23

2 Aesthetics and the Extreme 35

Traumatic Materialism 36

Melodrama and the Extreme 46

The Extreme and the Sublime 53

3 The Everyday, Vulnerability and the Extreme 79

Extreme Time 83

Extreme Management 97

Extreme War and the Everyday 104

Extreme Agency 109

4 Vulnerability, Biovalues and Witnessing (In)Human Extremes 117

Ways of Living, Ways of Dying 119

Shared Precarity, Helplessness and the Moral Extreme 122

Witnessing 129.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Nayar, Pramod K., author. Extreme in contemporary culture

ISBN:

9781783483662

9781783483655

1783483652

1783483660

OCLC:

961007064

Publisher Number:

99971603490