Contaminations: Beyond Dialectics in Modern Literature, Science and Film - Softcover

Mack, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1474425593 ISBN 13: 9781474425599

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Introduces the figure of contamination as alternative to dialectics
Whereas dialectics separates two entities and traverses from one to the other (finally negating negation), contamination allows for the simultaneous interdependence of what has previously been conceived as separate or opposed. The book enquires into the problem of various oppositions between pure entities such as nature and society, body and mind, science and the arts, subjectivity and objectivity, action and contemplation, the sacred and the profane. It examines how works of literature and cinema have contaminated constructions of the pure and the immune with their purported opposite. As an advanced critical introduction to the figure of contamination, the book makes explicit what so far has remained unarticulated―what has only been implied―within postmodern and poststructuralist, and deconstructive theory.
Combining theory with literary criticism, the book sheds light on how overlooked aspects of Henry James’s , H. Melville’s and H. G. Wells’s novels question notions of natural order as well as an opposition between the subjective and the objective. It offers fresh readings of classic films and literary texts, including Vertigo and Moby Dick, with the aim to ground theoretical insights in close analysis.
Key features
Critically engages with some aspects of contemporary theory that keep propounding a Cartesian notion of the mind’s control over the bodyAnalyses how key thinkers such as Spinoza, Benjamin, Pasolini and Freud attempt to re-evaluate what Agamben calls ‘bare life’Offers original readings of Pasolini’s notion of scandalo in terms of contaminationAlerts us to the ways in which some aspects of contemporary posthumanism may merely reproduce the dialects of inclusion and exclusion which is still premised on traditional notions of purity and immunity

About this title

About the Author

Michael Mack is Reader (Associate Professor and tenured Research Fellow) in English Studies and Medical Humanities at Durham University. He is the author of Philosophy and Literature in Times of Crisis: Challenging our Infatuation with Numbers (Bloomsbury, 2014), How Literature Changes the Way we Think (Continuum, 2012), Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity: the hidden Enlightenment of Diversity from Spinoza to Freud (Continuum, 2010), German Idealism and the Jew. The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and Anthropology as Memory: Elias Canetti and Franz Baermann Steiner’s Responses to the Shoah (Niemeyer, 2001).

From the Back Cover

*APPROVED*This is the first study to introduce the figure of contamination as an alternative to dialecticsThis book enquires into the problem of various oppositions between pure entities such as natureand society, body and mind, science and the arts, subjectivity and objectivity. It examines howworks of literature and cinema have contaminated constructions of the pure and the immunewith their purported opposite. As an advanced critical introduction to the figure ofcontamination, the book makes explicit what so far has remained unarticulated - what has onlybeen implied - within postmodern, poststructuralist and deconstructive theory.Combining theory with literary criticism, the book sheds light on how overlooked aspects ofthe novels of Henry James, Herman Melville and H. G. Wells question notions of natural orderas well as an opposition between the subjective and the objective. It offers fresh readings of classicfilms and literary texts, including Vertigo and Moby Dick, with the aim to ground theoreticalinsights in close analysis.Key Features• Critically engages with some aspects of contemporary theory that keep propounding aCartesian notion of the mind’s control over the body• Analyses how key thinkers such as Spinoza, Benjamin, Pasolini and Freud attempt tore-evaluate what Agamben calls ‘bare life’• Offers original readings of Pasolini’s notion of scandalo in terms of contamination• Alerts us to the ways in which some aspects of contemporary posthumanism may merelyreproduce the dialects of inclusion and exclusion which is still premised on traditionalnotions of purity and immunityMichael Mack is Reader in English Studies at Durham University. His recent publicationsinclude How Literature Changes the Way We Think (2012).Cover image: Contamination, Elisabeth Mack-Usselmann, photographed by Richard StopfordISBN 978-1-4744-1136-3Barcode

Edition details

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1474425593
• ISBN 13: 9781474425599
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240