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
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).
