Synopses & Reviews
In this fascinating book, Christine Buci-Glucksmann explores the condition of modernity-alienation, melancholy, and nostalgia-through the writing of a number of philosophers, including the social and aesthetic writings of Walter Benjamin. In her rich discussion, she focuses on the ways in which social realities can be represented, and in particular with how modernity might be represented. Moreover, she examines how the great 20th-century thinkers like Nietzsche, Adorno, Musil, Barthes, and Lacan--in spite of their many differences-are seen to constitute a baroque paradigm. Finally, her extraordinary exposition of a baroque reason for modernity sheds new light on a number of themes central to modern social theory-the critique of instrumental rationality, the political crisis of socialism, the loss of community and of innocence with the development of industrialization, and the impact of relativism on realist theories of knowledge This powerful book is essential reading for all those interested in cultural, social, feminist, and literary theory.
Synopsis
Buci-Glucksmann explores the condition of modernity through the works of a number of writers and philosophers.She considers how figures such as Nietzsche, Adorno, Musil, Barthes and Lacan constitute a baroque paradigm, united by their allegorical style, their conflation of aesthetics with ethics and their subject matter.
Synopsis
This important book explores the condition of modernity - alienation, melancholy, nostalgia - through the works of writers and philosophers, and with particular reference to the social and aesthetic philosophy of Walter Benjamin. Christine Buci-Glucksmann addresses modernity through the notion of the other, and shows how the feminine is used as one of the main sources of allegorical interpretation, standing for the miraculous, the utopian, the dangerous and the androgynous. The author also examines Baudelaire's haunting image of the city and its profound effect on conceptions of modernity. She goes on to consider how such influential figures as Nietzsche, Adorno, Musil, Barthes and Lacan constitute a baroque paradigm, united by their allegorical style, their conflation of aesthetics with ethics and their subject matter - death, catastrophe, sexuality, myth, the female. In her exegesis of these fundamental themes Buci-Glucksmann proposes an epistemology beyond postmodernism. This extraordinary exposition of a baroque reason for modernity sheds new light on a number of themes central to modern social theory: the critique of instrumental rationality; the political crisis of socialism; the loss of community and of innocence since the growth of industrialization; and the impact of relativism on realist theories of knowledge. This powerful book is essential reading for all those interested in cultural, social, feminist and literary theory and philosophy and urban studies. This edition was translated by Patrick Camiller and includes an Introduction by Bryan S. Turner, Deakin University, Australia.