Burdens of Political Responsibility

By: Jade Larissa Schiff

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Synopsis: 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? J. L. Schiff calls this experience of responsibility the cultivation of responsiveness. In Burdens of Political Responsibility: Narrative, Ontology, 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 that how we represent our world and ourselves in the stories we share, and how we receive those stories, can facilitate and frustrate the cultivation of responsiveness.