Essai
Nouvelle parution
Christopher BRACKEN, Magical Criticism : The Recourse of Savage Philosophy

Christopher BRACKEN, Magical Criticism : The Recourse of Savage Philosophy

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : Site web de la maison d'édition)


Christopher BRACKEN, Magical Criticism : The Recourse of Savage Philosophy, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007, 256 p.
ISBN 978-0-226-06991-3
ISBN-10 0-226-06991-5


RÉSUMÉ

During the Enlightenment, Western scholars racialized ideas, deemingknowledge based on reality superior to that based on ideality. Scholarslabeled inquiries into ideality, such as animism and soul-migration,“savage philosophy,” a clear indicator of the racism motivating thedistinction between the real and the ideal. In their view, the savagephilosopher mistakes connections between signs for connections betweenreal objects and believes that discourse can have physical effects—inother words, they believe in magic.

Christopher Bracken's Magical Criticismbrings the unacknowledged history of this racialization to light andshows how, even as we have rejected ethnocentric notions of “thesavage,” they remain active today in everything from attacks onpostmodernism to Native American land disputes. Here Bracken revealsthat many of the most influential Western thinkers dabbled in savagephilosophy, from Marx, Nietzsche, and Proust, to Freud, C. S. Peirce,and Walter Benjamin. For Bracken, this recourse to savage philosophypresents an opportunity to reclaim a magical criticism that can explainthe very real effects created by the discourse of historians,anthropologists, philosophers, the media, and governments.