A Time for the Humanities Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy

by Bono, James J.; Dean, Tim; Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska

• ISBN13: 9780823229192
• ISBN10: 082322919X
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780823229215
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-11-15
• Publisher: Fordham University Press

Summary

This book brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines including philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the conceptual foundations of the humanities and the question of their future. What notions of the future, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties about the humanities in our current geopolitical situation? How can we think about the unpredictable and unthought dimensions of praxis implicit in the very notion of futurity?The essays here argue that the uncertainty of the future represents both an opportunity for critical engagement and a matrix for invention. Broadly conceived, the notion of invention, or cultural poiesis, questions the key assumptions and tasks of a whole range of practices in the humanities, beginning with critique, artistic practices, and intellectual inquiry, and ending with technology, emancipatory politics, and ethics. The essays discuss a wide range of key figures (e.g., Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray), problems (e.g., becoming, kinship and the foreign, "disposable populations" within a global political economy, queerness and the death drive, the parapoetic, electronic textuality, invention and accountability, political and social reform in Latin America), disciplines and methodologies (philosophy, art and art history, visuality, political theory, criticism and critique, psychoanalysis, gender analysis, architecture, literature, art). The volume should be required reading for all who feel a deep commitment to the humanities, its practices, and its future.

Author Biography

JAMES J. BONO is Associate Professor of History and of Medicine at the University at Buffalo.

TIM DEAN is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Humanities Institute at the University at Buffalo.

EWA PLONOWSKA ZIAREK is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature and Founding Director of the Humanities Institute at the University at Buffalo.

Table of Contents

Future, Heteronomy, Invention	p. 1
The New and Its Risks
Life and Event: Deleuze on Newness	p. 17
A Precursor: Limiting the Future, Affirming Particularity	p. 29
Visual Parrhesia? Foucault and the Truth of the Gaze	p. 45
Rhetoric and the Future of the Political
Articulation and the Limits of Metaphor	p. 61
Answering for Sense	p. 84
"Human" in the Age of Disposable People: The Ambiguous Import of Kinship and Education in Blind Shaft	p. 94
Heteronomy and Futurity in Psychoanalysis
The Foreign, the Uncanny, and the Foreigner: Concepts of the Self and the Other in Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Philosophy	p. 109
An Impossible Embrace: Queerness, Futurity, and the Death Drive	p. 122
Luce Irigaray and the Question of Critique	p. 141
Inventions
Parapoetics and the Architectural Leap	p. 161
The Future of Literature: Complex Surfaces of Electronic Texts and Print Books	p. 180
Crisis Means Turning Point: A Manifesto for Art and Accountability	p. 210
Notes	p. 227
Contributors	p. 265
Index	p. 269
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