The Reject Community, Politics, and Religion after the Subject [Hardcover]

This book proposes a theory of the reject, a more adequate figure than the subject for thinking friendship, love, community, democracy, the postsecular, and the posthuman.

Through close readings of Nancy, Deleuze, Derrida, Cixous, Clement, Bataille, Balibar, Ranciere, and Badiou, Goh shows how the reject has always been nascent in contemporary French thought. The recent turn to animals and bare life, as well as the rise of the Occupy movement, he argues, presents a special urgency to think the reject today.

Thinking the reject most importantly helps to advance our commitment to affirm others without acculturating their differences. But the reject also offers, Goh proposes, a response finally commensurate with the radical horizon of Nancys question of who comes after the subject.

Subject, Eject, Reject, Project: ject is the theme, the tone, the issue. Irving Goh understands perfectly the jection without any kind of junction, recognizing that what remains to be thought is just some ject-society or community. In reading The Reject,?one begins to join the unjoinable. This book proposes the reject as the figure of thought for our contemporaneous times. It shows how the reject can open us to radical forms of relations, democratic horizons, and post-secular and posthuman futures not only beyond anthropocentric limits, but also in ways by which others and their differences are affirmed respectfully.In this ambitious and spirited book Irving Goh traverses a great swath of recent French thought.In The Reject, Irving Goh not only traces the persistent presence of the subject in the work of Badiou (the faithful subject of the event), Ranci?re (the uncounted subject), Balibar (the citizen-subject), Rosi Braidotti (the critical post-human subject), and Katherine Hayles (the flickering post-human subject), he also provides clear and reasonable arguments as to why this presence poses serious problems for their respective attempts to think communil3*