Re: Negative Liberties

Thanks for these snippets, Dave.  They are very convincing and full of fresh 
insight, especially, for me, this last one.

DM

>From: Dave Monroe <[email protected]>
>
>From Cyrus R.K. Patell, Negative Liberties: Morrison,
>Pynchon, and the Problem of Liberal Ideology (Durham,
>NC: Duke UP, 2001), Ch. 3, "Unenlightened
>Enlightenment," pp. 82-140 ...
>
>[...]  In other words, to be an individual endowed
>with rights means to be acknowledged as the proprietor
>of your own person and your capacities: you own
>yourself and all that you can do.  Life itself is
>classified next to food, clothing, land, and other
>goods as property, something to be owned.
>    "Like Emerson, Pynchon worries that this is a
>danegrous way of thinking about individuality because
>it leads us to think that we have detrmined who we
>are.  Ploy's identity becomes intimately associated
>with his prostehsis, a possession that functions
>simultaneously as synecdoche and metonymy: [...]
>either as part of a whole or as an object that is
>substituted for another.  He thus becomes one of the
>'walking monsters' that Emerson describes in 'The
>American Scholar' [...].  As a result, 'man is
>metamorphosed into a thing' and 'the soulis subject to
>dollars.'
>    "The transformation of people into things is one of
>Pynchon's abiding subjects...." (pp. 92-3)
>
>
>
>
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