Burdens of Political Responsibility

How can human beings acknowledge and experience the burdens of political responsibility? Why are we tempted to flee them, and how might we come to affirm them? Jade Larissa Schiff calls this experience of responsibility "the cultivation of responsiveness." In Burdens of Political Responsibility: Narrative and the Cultivation of Responsiveness, she identifies three dispositions that inhibit responsiveness - thoughtlessness, bad faith, and misrecognition - and turns to storytelling in its manifold forms as a practice that might facilitate and frustrate it. Through critical engagements with an unusual cast of characters (from Bourdieu to Sartre) hailing from a variety of disciplines (political theory, phenomenology, sociology, and literary criticism), she argues that how we represent our world and ourselves in the stories we share, and how we receive those stories, can facilitate and frustrate the cultivation of responsiveness.

Author: Jade Larissa Schiff
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 03/10/2016
Pages: 228
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.68lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.48d
ISBN: 9781107614284

Review Citation(s):
Choice 01/01/2015 pg. 892

About the Author
Schiff, Jade Larissa: - Jade Larissa Schiff is Assistant Professor of Politics at Oberlin College, Ohio. Her specialty is in twentieth- and twenty-first-century continental political theory, and she works at the intersections of political theory, phenomenology, and literary criticism. Her current research explores experiences of suffering and the ways in which we narrate and respond to those experiences.

This title is not returnable