Bloodrites of the Post-Structuralists: Word Flesh and Revolution

In Bloodrites of the Post-Structuralists provocative theorist Anne Norton presents an alternative narrative of the history of the world. She starts by reminding us of the real interplay between words (laws, scriptures, myths, and history) and the world of flesh (of blood ties and bloodshed, skin colour and sexuality). The seemingly precious and all too literary constructs of the poststructuralists really do act on the body politic. The book is written on three historical sites: the revolutions in England and France, the struggle against colonialism, and the modern liberal order. In this telling, we see liberal constitutions born in Terror and regicide, we see a word, a text, a document, write "slave" on the darkness of the body, we see the guillotine release the power in the blood, and we hear the words that declare a people free. Norton re reads and re-writes foundational myths from Abraham and Isaac on the mountain top in the Bible to legends of the American Revolution. This lyrical and mesmerizing book serves, in its way, as a catalogue of oppressions, and a history of the justifications oppressors have made for injustices. It also makes clear that that these oppressions and justifications continue on today, as certainly as they did in any point in history. Defying easy categorization, Bloodrites of the Post-Structuralists is the ultimate challenge to all those who claim that history has come to end, or that life is classifiable or un-complex, or that we understand all we need to understand about the story of Western History.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: A Shape of Life Grown Old Part I. 1. Power in the Blood 2. Closed Body, Open Mind 3. The Word, the Flesh, the colonized 4. Hand and Eye 5. Open Bodies, Closed Minds Part II. 6. Writing Over Blood 7. The Man of Blood and the Army of Scripture 8. The Jews of Change Alley 9. Dutch Williams Part III. 10. Revolutionary Memory 11. The Death of Marat 12. The Perverse Authority of Writing Part IV. 13. The Sacrifice 14. The Fire Next Time 15. Semele, or The Enlightenment in Flames Part V. 16. The Laughter of Demeter 17. The Laughter of Sarah 18. The Annunciation, or the Text in the Womb 19. The Circumcised

About the Author :
Anne Norton is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the founding co-editor of the journal, Theory and Event.

Review :
"I am a long-standing admirer of Anne Norton, who is a courageous and brilliant writer."-Homi Bhabha, Harvard University." "A remarkable work of wide-ranging learning, subtle intelligence and capacious sympathies."-Uday Mehta, Amherst College." "[Norton's] book is thus part of a politcal project, another contribution to the deconstruction of the order." -- Perspectives on Politics