Description
Book SynopsisBy investigating an array of cultural artifacts, ranging from Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey to the Oracle at Delphi to Luther’s challenge to the Church, this book demonstrates how the apparently benign emergence of writing made possible far-ranging systems of organised domination and unprecedented levels of violence.
Trade ReviewThe Violence of the Letter is exceptionally well written, and the style is original and enjoyable. It engages insightfully with domination, offers a reframing of the Oedipus complex, returns on the separation of soul and body, dissects the violence of alphabetization, and observes the interaction of writing, colonialism, and capitalism: a must read." - Lorenzo Veracini, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne
"This book is a provocative, innovative, and engaging work . . . will prove an important and novel contribution to ‘theory’ in general and to ‘theory of writing’ in particular." - Ron Scapp, College of Mount Saint Vincent
"McMahon activates a range of scholarship from neuroscience, literary theories, and cultural histories.
The Violence of the Letter explores diverse sets of relations which about how the alphabet works as a particular kind of phenomena for writing. Its significance is a theory of literacy about the governing of social life in Western modernities." - Thomas S. Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Table of Contents
- Prelude
- Introduction
- Chapter 1. A Brief Technical Detour
- Chapter 2. The Trauma of Literacy
- Chapter 3. The Alphabet and Reproduction
- Chapter 4. Plato and the Forms of Alphabetic Writing
- Chapter 5. The Alphabet and Money
- Interlude
- Chapter 6. Letters of Fire and Blood
- Chapter 7. The Subject Is Always Alphabetized
- Bibliography
- Index
