Labyrinths : Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas

Wolin, Richard

ISBN 10: 0870239902 / ISBN 13: 9780870239908

Published by University of Massachusetts Press, 1995

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 159906-n

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Labyrinths : Explorations in the Critical History of Ideas
• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0870239902
• ISBN 13: 9780870239908
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

This book offers a series of probing reflections on issues at the heart of recent debates in philosophy, literary theory, and intellectual history. In ten powerfully articulated essays, Richard Wolin calls into question the implied radicalism of the so-called postmodern turn, exposes the unstated agenda of neoconservative cultural theory, and provides a major reinterpretation of Walter Benjamin's place in contemporary cultural studies.

At the center of the book lie the peculiar and troubling affinities between two groups of cultural critics usually seen as antithetical: the radical conservative thinkers of Germany's Weimar Republic and the French poststructuralists who came to the prominence in the aftermath of the May 1968 uprising.

Wolin concludes the volume with a cogent reappraisal of "antihumanism" as a leitmotif of postwar French intellectual culture, along with a reassessment of the "de Man affair" and its implications for the poststructuralist interpretation of fascism.

About the Author

RICHARD WOLIN is professor of modern European intellectual history at Rice University. His books include The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption.