Böcker av Henry Sussman

The diverse materials comprising Impasses of the Post-Global take as their starting point an interrelated, if seemingly endless sequence of current ecological, demographic, socio-political, economic, and informational disasters. These have impacted on the stakes and tenor of cultural criticism as much as they have on tangible relations in the contemporary world. The contributors to the Impasses struggle as valiantly with a rapidly unfolding set of new discursive and communicative preconditions as they do with the open-ended chain of current insults and injuries to the ecological, socio-political, and cultural surrounds. These in turn demand increased attentiveness on the part of culturally and politically engaged readers. If the volume claims a global, if not post-global scope in the range of its perspectives and interventions, the diversity of approaches and interests advanced and updated by its contributors is correspondingly vast. These include the contemporary discourses of deconstruction, climate change, ecological imbalance and despoilment, sustainability, security, economic bailout, auto-immunity, and globalization itself. With contributions by James H. Bunn, Rey Chow, Bruce Clarke, Tom Cohen, Randy Martin, Yates McKee, Alberto Moreiras, Haun Saussy, Tian Song, Henry Sussman, Samuel Weber, Ewa P. Ziarek, and Kryzsztof Ziarek.

Veteran scholar and critic Henry Sussman deploys anecdote, reportage, and memoir to lament and scrutinize the rise of anti-intellectualism in the past few decades. How are we to reckon with the decline of impartiality and sharp increase in self-interested interference in politic, legal, and cultural spheres; the normalization of pathological narcissism in public life; and the blanket dismissal of scientific findings and their counterparts in the humanities and social sciences?In retracing his own intellectual and experiential steps, Sussman revisits many of his lasting inspirations, including Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Immanuel Kant, and J. Hillis Miller. The result is an intellectual meditation on 'the great dismissal,' in public and political life, of venerable and vital humanistic traditions, ethics, and ways of thinking.

New essays by leading scholars on the most perplexing of modern writers, Franz Kafka.