Ferdie Fluitsma wees mij op de komst in september van het
volgende boek
Patrick McGee, Political
Monsters and Democratic Imagination. Spinoza, Blake, Hugo, Joyce. Bloomsbury Academic, 8 Sept. 2016
Political Monsters and Democratic Imagination explores the democratic thought of
Spinoza and its relation to the thought of William Blake, Victor Hugo, and
James Joyce. As a group, these visionaries articulate: a concept of power
founded not on strength or might but on social cooperation; a principle of
equality based not on the identity of individuals with one another but on the
difference between any individual and the intellectual power of society as a
whole; an understanding of thought as a process that operates between rather
than within individuals; and a theory of infinite truth, something individuals
only partially glimpse from their particular cultural situations. For Blake,
God is the constellation of individual human beings, whose collective imagination
produces revolutionary change. In Hugo's novel, Jean Valjean learns that the
greatest truth about humanity lies in the sewer or among the lowest forms of
social existence. For Joyce, Leopold and Molly Bloom are everybody and nobody,
singular beings whose creative power and truth is beyond categories and social
hierarchies.
