Tolerance: A Sensorial Orientation to Politics

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Abstract

Tolerance: A Sensorial Orientation to Politics is an experiment in re-orientation. The book is based on the wager that tolerance exceeds the more prevalent images of self-restraint and repressive benevolence because neither precludes the possibility of a more “active tolerance” motivated by the desire to experiment and to become otherwise. The objective is to discuss what gets lost, conceptually as well as politically, when we neglect the subsistence of active tolerance within other practices of tolerance, and to develop a theory of active tolerance in which tolerance's mobilizing character is linked to a different set of circumstances than the ones suggested by existing models in contemporary democratic theory. Reorienting the discussion of tolerance, the book raises the question of how to disclose new possibilities within our given context of affect and perception. Once we move away from the current models of restraint and benevolence, other ways of understanding the politics of democratic pluralism might be developed, which will enable us to conceive of tolerance's future in terms different than those currently on offer. Tolerance: A Sensorial Orientation to Politics develops these alternatives by returning to the notion of tolerance as the endurance of pain, linking this notion to exemplars and theories relevant to the politics of multiculturalism, religious freedom, and free speech.
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationN.Y.
PublisherOxford University Press
ISBN (Print)9780199315802, 9780199315819
ISBN (Electronic)9780199367634
Publication statusPublished - 2013

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