The concept of ‘performativity’ has risen to prominence throughout the humanities. The rise of financial derivatives reflects the power of the performative sign in the economic sphere. As recent debates about gender identity show, the concept of performativity is also profoundly influential on people’s personal lives. Although the autonomous power of representation has been studied in disciplines ranging from economics to poetics, however, it has not yet been evaluated in ethical terms. This book supplies that deficiency, providing an ethical critique of performative representation as it is manifested in semiotics, linguistics, philosophy, poetics, theology and economics. It constructs a moral criticism of the performative sign in two ways: first, by identifying its rise to power as a single phenomenon manifested in various different areas; and second, by locating efficacious representation in its historical context, thus connecting it to idolatry, magic, usury and similar performative signs. The book concludes by suggesting that earlier ethical critiques of efficacious representation might be revived in our own postmodern era.
Author(s): David Hawkes
Series: Palgrave Insights into Apocalypse Economics
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 275
City: Cham
Acknowledgments
Contents
1 Usury, Sodomy and Idolatry
1.1 Three in One, One in Three
1.2 The Ethics of Hyper-reality
1.3 The Politics of Anti-logos
2 Performativity in Postmodernity
2.1 Exchange Value and the Queer
2.2 The Decline of Reference
2.3 The Death of the Soul I: The Materialist Subject
2.4 The Death of the Soul II: Sadian Society
3 The Commodification of Rhetoric in Classical Athens
3.1 Solon Meets Thespis
3.2 Money Personified: Aristophanes’ Plutus
3.3 Usury and Sophistry in Aristophanes’ Clouds
3.4 Philosophy Contra Sophistry
3.5 Blaming Helen
4 Witchcraft and Representation in Early Modern England
4.1 The Logocentric Conception of Magic
4.2 The Criminalization of Magic
4.3 Reproduction and Inflation
4.4 Concupiscence on Stage
5 Commodification and the Performative Sign in Eucharistic Ethics
5.1 Logos in the Sacrament
5.2 Martin Luther: Against the Commodification of Ritual
5.3 John Calvin and the Radical Reformation
6 The Two Usuries: Performative Representation in the City Comedies
6.1 Usury and Lust
6.2 Society of Shows
6.3 The Broking Knight of Troy
6.4 From Cuckold to Wittol
7 Modernism, Inflation, and the Gold Standard
7.1 Modernism and Representation
7.2 Ezra Pound: Usura contra naturam
7.3 T. S. Eliot: The Gold Standard as Objective Correlative
7.4 Ernest Hemingway, Harold Loeb, and Anti-Semitism
8 Against Financial Derivatives: Toward an Ethics of Representation
8.1 What’s the Problem?
8.2 The Money of Money
8.3 Money as Representation
8.4 Don Quixote and Derivatives
8.5 Toward an Ethics of Representation
9 The Future-Sign: Representation in the Anglophone Yoruba Novel
9.1 Afro-Postmodernism
9.2 Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard
9.3 Slave Wars: Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
9.4 Reading in the Work of Ben Okri
Index
