Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism

258 Pages·2011·1.31 MB·English

by  Elizabeth A. Povinelli

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© 2011 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America
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Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data appear on the last printed
page of this book.
To Nuki Bilbil
May she rest in peace
Even if she is not
Where I wish she were

Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction The Child in the Broom Closet 1
One The Part That Has No Part 47
Two The Brackets of Recognition 75
Three Road Kill
Ethical Substance, Exhaustion, Endurance 101
Four Events of Abandonment 131
Five After Good and Evil, Whither
Sacrificial Love? 163
Conclusion Negative Critique, Positive Sociographies 187
Notes 193
Bibliography 211
Index 225

Preface
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the
beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always
substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a
breed of life.
WAlT WhITmAN, Song of myself
This book is a meditation on alternative worlds
in the shadow of contemporary transformations
of late liberalism, a phrase I will explain more
fully in the introduction, but which can here be
understood as the governance of social differ-
ence in the wake of the anticolonial movements
and the emergence of new social movements. It
looks at shattered lives and exhausting struggles,
at discourses that deflect ethical and social re-
sponsibility for crushing if at times imperceptible
harms, and at scholarly attachments to miracles of