Burdens of Political Responsibility: Narrative and the Cultivation of Responsiveness [Hardcover]

Burdens of Political Responsibility discusses experiences of political responsibility through a variety of disciplines, including political theory, phenomenology, sociology, and literary criticism.Burdens of Political Responsibility addresses our experiences of political responsibility. It explains how and why we try to flee responsibility, and how we might embrace it. The book is politically significant because responsibility is a perennial and urgent issue, and it is a unique contribution to political theory because of its interdisciplinary character and its focus on experience and narrative. The book engages seriously with phenomenology, the philosophy of literature, literary criticism, and sociology.Burdens of Political Responsibility addresses our experiences of political responsibility. It explains how and why we try to flee responsibility, and how we might embrace it. The book is politically significant because responsibility is a perennial and urgent issue, and it is a unique contribution to political theory because of its interdisciplinary character and its focus on experience and narrative. The book engages seriously with phenomenology, the philosophy of literature, literary criticism, and sociology.How can human beings acknowledge and experience the burdens of political responsibility? Why are we tempted to flee them, and how might we come to affirm them? Jade Larissa Schiff calls this experience of responsibility the cultivation of responsiveness. In Burdens of Political Responsibility: Narrative and the Cultivation of Responsiveness, she identifies three dispositions that inhibit responsiveness  thoughtlessness, bad faith, and misrecognition  and turns to storytelling in its manifold forms as a practice that might facilitate and frustrate it. Through critical engagements with an unusual cast of characters (from Bourdieu to Sartre) hailing from a variety of disciplines (political theory, phenomenology, sociology, and literary criticism), she argues tlã-