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Textual Conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry and Political Theory by James R. Martel (Paperback, 2013)

In Textual Conspiracies , James R. Martel applies the literary, theological, and philosophical insights of Walter Benjamin to the question of politics and the predicament of the contemporary left. Through the lens of Benjamin's theories, as influenced by Kafka, of the fetishisation of political symbols and signs, Martel looks at the ways in which various political and literary texts speak to each other across the gulf of time and space, thereby creating a textual conspiracy that destabilises grand narratives of power and authority and makes the narratives of alternative political communities more apparent. However, in keeping with Benjamin's insistence that even he is complicit with the fetishism that he battles, Martel decentralises Benjamin's position as the key theorist for this conspiracy and contextualises Benjamin in what he calls a constellation of pairs of thinkers and writers throughout history, including Alexis de Tocqueville and Edgar Allen Poe, Hannah Arendt and Federico Garcia Lorca, and Frantz Fan and Assia Djebar.

Place of Publication
Ann Arbor
Spine
25mm
Author Biography
James R. Martel Is Associate Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University, USA.
Date of Publication
30/03/2013
Country of Publication
United States
Genre
Literary Criticism

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