Description: Nothing Sacred makes a bold call for reconceptualizing the projects of humanism and democracy as creative sources of emancipatory meaning, from the immediate political sphere to the farthest reaches of planetary ways of living.
Review Quotes: If, as Adorno contended, history does intrude on every word, if it withholds each word from the recovery of some alleged original meaning, it is incumbent upon us to attend to each and every word we use with exacting attention. No one I read these days foregrounds, indeed, rethinks words, the most demanding words, with the unflinching attention, with the capacious erudition and the poetic creation, demanded and exemplified by Stathis Gourgouris. Thus, with human-being, Gourgouris attends to the intrusive and withholding history of animality, race, and technology; with democracy, to that of anarchy and finitude, of violence and tragedy, of capitalism; and with the sacred--Gourgouris tarries for effect--nothing. This is a formidable book.--Gil Anidjar, Columbia University