Amartya Sen’s Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Allen Lane/Penguin) was a short treat. Here is one orphan paragraph, rounded for interim finish by the sentence that immediately follows (p. 175):
The illusion of singular identity, which serves the violent purpose of those orchestrating confrontations, is skillfully cultivated and fomented by the commanders of persecution and carnage. It is not remarkable that generalizing the illusion of unique identity, exploitable for the purpose of confrontation, would appeal to those who are in the business of fomenting violence, and there is no mystery to the fact that such reductionism is sought. But there is a big question about why the cultivation of singularity is so successful, given the extraordinary na¯vet© of that thesis in a world of obviously plural affiliations. To see a person exclusively in terms of only one of his or her many identities is, of course, a deeply crude intellectual move, and yet, judging from its effectiveness, the cultivated delusion of singularity is evidently easy enough to champion and promote. The advocacy of unique identity for a violent purpose takes the form of separating out one identity group – directly linked to the violent purpose at hand – for special focus, and it proceeds from there to eclipse the relevance of other associations and affiliations through selective emphasis and incitement. The martial art of fostering violence draws on some basic instincts and uses them to crowd out the freedom to think and the possibility of composing reason.
Did you, perchance, also come across something worth reading?
Elsewhere: Gummo, on a parallel line, in a sort of caught and bowled way.
Wow – Mr Sheil read a book full of big words and can’t wait to tell everyone! So good to have you back… I guess we can safely unbookmark this blog now.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year cs and everyone else. I requested and received under the tree “Apex Hides the Hurt” the new novel by Colson Whitehead whose first two I loved. Pretty much my favourite contemporary author (except for all the usual suspects everyone has already heard of.) His others are The Intuitionist and John Henry Days, both of which you should check out. One of the few authors that literally makes me stop to catch my breath at the beauty of it all every so often. I haven’t read it yet, almost don’t want to start because the sooner you start, the sooner you finish and you have nothing to look forward to.
As I mentioned a while back I think on a Weekend thread, I caught the Charmian Clift bug a few months ago. Listened to “Mermaid Singing” and “Peel me a lotus” on ‘first person’ at the end of the book show on Radio National. Then it turned out that my wife had bought Nadia Wheatley’s bio of her for a friend and hadn’t given it to her. So I read that. Absolutely bloody marvellous. Will try to do a post on it some time, but in the meantime I’m reading My Brother Jack by Clift’s hubby George Johnston (which I’m enjoying and hadn’t read before) and I plan to read Susan Johnson’s novel inspired by Clift’s life (I love Susan Johnson’s stuff). Then I got talking to some booksellers about it all and she has 20 our of print books by Charmian’s first born daughter. Charmian had her adopted out when keeping kids out of wedlock was not the done thing. The book called Searching for Charmian is apparently marvellously written, and the booksellers I spoke to had become friends of hers and launched her book in Canberra. So I’ve got that to read as well.
Sen is a great read, and for mine, his The Argumentative Indian is even better.
I’ve been reading a lot of very large hardcover history books, as described in my “what I read on the holidays” post :)
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2006/12/28/historicising-the-rectification-of-names/