Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays on the everyday workings of language and how language shapes our social and political existence.
Trade Review“Denise Riley writes a poet’s prose, and her theoretical originality more than matches the engaging quality of her writing. She breathes life into the claim that the ‘I’ is an effect of language and draws her reader in both for the sake of her brilliant unpacking of existential idioms and for her renewal of the theoretical questions of where and how language locates us and how and with what effect we can relocate ourselves.”—Ellen Rooney, Brown University
“Denise Riley’s splendor as a writer is unclassifiable: she is language philosopher, phenomenologist, poet, feminist theorist, and cultural critic all bound into one. In addition to the gorgeous thinking and language,
Impersonal Passion offers singular takes on common conundrums that most of us don’t think deeply about let alone get to the bottom of. This book is a rarity: a work of philosophy that one can’t put down.”—Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1. Malediction 9
2. "What I Want Back Is What I Was": Consolation's Retrospect 29
3. The Right to be Lonely 49
4. Why WHYs and
why mes 59
5. Linguistic Inhibition as a Cause of Pregnancy 71
6. "Lying" When You Aren't 85
7. All Mouth and No Trousers: Linguistic Embarrassments 97
8. "But Then I Wouldn't Be Here" 105
9. Your Name Which Isn't Yours 115
Notes 129
