Böcker av Armen Avanessian

New approaches to the ocean enabled by the new field of (microbial) oceanography. In recent years, a new field of scientific research has been put forward, the so-called (microbial) oceanography, which offers a new mapping of the ocean from its shiny surfaces to lightless sea floors. Oceanography combines techniques of molecular biology, gene sequencing, bioinformatics, and remote sensing, among others. Oceans are a crucial factor in global climate and necessary condition for human survival on earth, and findings from oceanography can help people better understand life (and survival) in the Anthropocene.Not only are all life forms of marine origin, but the oceans also host extremophiles--that is, microbial life forms living under extreme conditions of heat, cold, lack of light--which are integral to understanding what possible alternative life forms might look like. It may be that such mainly anthropogenic forces as overfishing, pollution, deep-sea mining, and acidification suggest that a new concept of the ocean--Anthropocean--needs to be discussed. New approaches in cultural studies as well as in the history of sciences are shifting our vision of the ocean, considering the previous realm of immeasurable broad and depth as a fundamental contrast to a human history and culture in order to rewrite it. Edited in dialogue with Stefan Helmreich Copublished with the V-A-C Foundation Contributors Penny Chisholm, Robert Danovano, Sabine Höhler, Jessica Lehman, Naomi Oreskes, Helen Rozwadoski, Philip Steinberg, Cindy van Dover

The logic of modernity is an ironical logic. Modern irony, a flash of genius produced by Romantic theorists, is first discussed, e.g. in Hegel and Kierkegaard, as an ethical problem personified in figures such as the aesthete, the seducer, the flaneur, or the dandy. It fully develops in the novel, the modern genre par excellence: in novels of the early 19th century no less than in those of postmodernity or in those of the masters of citation, parody, and pastiche of classical modernism (Musil, Joyce, and Proust). This book, however, goes one step further. Looking at how such different authors as Schmitt, Kafka, and Rorty identify the political conflicts, contradictions, and paradoxes of the 20th century as ironical and offers a comprehensive account of the constitutive irony of modernity's ethical, poetical, and political logic.

"This book is an attempt at restating the importance of the great metaphysical categories of substance and accident, form and matter, life and death for the present: how our contemporary predicament forces us both to reclaim them and to give them a radically new twist"--