Through a critical exploration of violence and the sacred, Ecce Humanitas recasts the fall of liberal humanism. Brad Evans offers a rich analysis of the changing nature of sacrificial violence, from its theological origins to the exhaustion of the victim in the contemporary world.
Through a critical exploration of violence and the sacred, Ecce Humanitas recasts the fall of liberal humanism. Brad Evans offers a rich analysis of the changing nature of sacrificial violence, from its theological origins to the exhaustion of the victim in the contemporary world. He critiques the aestheticization that turns victims into sacred objects, sacrificial figures that demand response, perpetuating a cycle of violence that is seen as natural and inevitable. In novel readings of classic and contemporary works, Evans traces the sacralization of violence as well as art's potential to incite resistance. Countering the continued annihilation of life, Ecce Humanitas calls for liberating the political imagination from the scene of sacrifice. A new aesthetics provides a form of transgressive witnessing that challenges the ubiquity of violence and allows us to go beyond humanism to imagine a truly liberated humanity.
In Ecce Humanitas, Brad Evans has given us a manifesto for how to effectively address the cryptotheology that lies at the heart of Western modernity. Whereas we tend to think of the sacred as an archaic concept, Evans shows how it remains central to our lives; unrecognized, it wreaks havoc (violent havoc) upon subject populations. Evans proposes that we rethink the void that is at the heart of the sacred as a place of power and creativity and, in that way, both reaffirm the sacred and redeploy it against the very violent forces that it is ordinarily instantiates. In so doing, Evans has capped a highly successful career of studying violence with a way out and through its dangerous entanglements. This is a brave and extraordinarily timely work in a period when the threat of violence is particularly acute and ubiquitous.
