The persistent reader of the “definitely incomplete” historicity: On Jina Politi’s book Reading Confiteor
Athena Athanasiou
Summary
Book review of Jina Politi’s Reading Confiteor. The book review proposes a reading of the way in which Jina Politi reads Jaume Cabré’s Confiteor. Special attention is given to the relationship between the notions of descent/kinship and propriety/ownership, as it underlies the bloody history of Europe from the Spanish Inquisition to the present day. How to account for the family into which one has been born? How can one confess this “mistake”?
BIO
Athena Athanasiou is Professor of Social Anthropology and Gender Theory at Panteion University. Among her publications are the books: Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black (Edinburgh University Press, 2017); Life at the Limit: Essays on Gender, Body and Biopolitics (Athens, 2007); Crisis as a ‘State of Exception’ (Athens, 2012); and (with Judith Butler) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Polity Press, 2013).