Hope: The Politics of Optimism

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A colourful map of the current conflict between pessimism and optimism in Western politics and theory, Hope attempts to reveal both the deep history and contemporary necessity of political hopefulness.

Starting in the 17th century with Spinoza, Wortham tells the story of the various fallacies and insights of pessimism and optimism through the 18th century with the help of Kant and Voltaire through to the famously nihilistic writings of Nietzsche and the 20th century works of thinkers such as Benjamin, Arendt, Kristeva and Fanon (to name but a few). He explores the contemporary significance of ideas such as affirmation, sovereignty, violence, therapy, existentialism and, of course, the oft maligned notion of 'hopefulness' to create a politics of optimism which avoids the pitfalls of uncritical acceptance of the status quo or the newest political idea.

Short chapters written in an engaging narrative manner enable the reader to follow the story of political optimism over the last 4 centuries inspiring a new way of thinking about the transformative uses of hopefulness.

Reviews

Neo-liberalisms savage hegemony shapes subjects and affects together:
jaded, pessimistic, indifferent, or their twins, entrepreneurial, risk-taking, long-range, even future-proof subjects. Can we still hopefor forms of association, action, the distribution of resources and enjoyment, other than those marked and made by this hegemonic formation What grounds are there for optimism Simon Morgan Wortham makes from the materials of the Western Enlightenment a genealogy for a politics of optimismsubstantially groundless, necessary. By showing that thought is never either past-proof or future-proof
Hope: The Politics of Optimism rigorously and lucidly redefines politics for our torn present.

-- Jacques Lezra, Professor and Chair, Department of Hispanic Studies University of California--Riverside, United States
Simon Worthams eminently readable new book unfolds the dialectic of hope from Spinoza to Balibar. Hope: The Politics of Optimism traces with brilliance and insight this constitutive oscillation between optimism and despair across modern leftist thought, to argue that even the bleakest nihilism remains grounded in the originary affirmation of all enunciation, from which depths critique can hope, finally, to put real limits to power. -- Nick Nesbitt, Professor of Languages and Literatures, Princeton University, USA

Author Bio

Simon Wortham is Professor of Critical Humanities, Kingston University London, UK. He is author of Resistance and Psychoanalysis (2017), Samuel Weber: Acts of Reading (2017), Modern Thought in Pain: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis (2015), The Poetics of Sleep (Bloomsbury, 2013), The Derrida Dictionary (Bloomsbury, 2010), Derrida: Writing Events (Bloomsbury, 2008), Experimenting: Essays with Samuel Weber (2007), Counter-Institutions (2006) and Rethinking the University (2009)