Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy)

We are living in a time of inflationary media. While technological change has periodically altered and advanced the ways humans process and transmit knowledge, for the last 100 years the media with which we produce, transmit, and record ideas have multiplied in kind, speed, and power. Saturation in media is provoking a crisis in how we perceive and understand reality. Media become inflationary when the scope of their representation of the world outgrows the confines of their culture's prior grasp of reality. We call the resulting concept of reality that emerges the culture's medialogy. Medialogies offers a highly innovative approach to the contemporary construction of reality in cultural, political, and economic domains. Castillo and Egginton, both luminary scholars, combine a very accessible style with profound theoretical analysis, relying not only on works of philosophy and political theory but also on novels, Hollywood films, and mass media phenomena. The book invites us to reconsider the way reality is constructed, and how truth, sovereignty, agency, and authority are understood from the everyday, philosophical, and political points of view. A powerful analysis of actuality, with its roots in early modernity, this work is crucial to understanding reality in the information age.

David R. Castillo is Director of the Humanities Institute at SUNY Buffalo and Professor of Spanish in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures, where he served as Chair between 2009 and 2015. He is the author of Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities and Awry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Picaresque, and co-author of Zombie Talk: Culture, History, Politics. Castillo has also co-edited Reason and Its Others: Italy, Spain, and the New World.

William Egginton is a philosopher and literary scholar at the Johns Hopkins University, where he is the inaugural director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, holds the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities, and chairs the department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures. He is the author, editor, or translator of more than a dozen books, including How the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle in History (2007), The Philosopher's Desire (2007), The Theater of Truth (2010), In Defense of Religious Moderation (2011), and The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered In the Modern World (2016).

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Global Reconstitution (IGRec), Berlin, Germany. His writings span the fields of ecological theory, phenomenology, and political thought. He is the author of numerous scientific articles and monographs, including Plant-Thinking (2013), The Philosopher's Plant (2014), Dust (2016), Energy Dreams (2017), Heidegger (2018), Political Categories (2019), Pyropolitics (2015, 2020), Dump Philosophy (2020); Hegel's Energy (2021), Green Mass (2021), Philosophy for Passengers (2022), The Phoenix Complex (2023), Time Is a Plant (2023), and, with Edward S. Casey, Plants in Place (2024). More information at michaelmarder.org.