Postmodern Spiritual Practices. The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault.

MILLER, P.A.,

ISBN 10: 0814210708 / ISBN 13: 9780814210703

Published by Ohio State University Press, 2007

About this Item

Ohio State University Press, Columbus, 2007. X,270p. Hardbound. Lower corner front cover slightly damaged. Else fine. 'What makes M.'s book important for both classicists and literary theorists in general is his sophisticated and nuanced comparison between modernist and postmodernist engagements with antiquity. M. (.) concerns himself with questioning why French modernism was so interested in Greek tragedy, whereas postmodern thinkers became more preoccupied with the Platonic oeuvre. (.) M.'s book powerfully shows that postmoderns like Lacan, Derrida and Foucault were profoundly preoccupied with making sense of the legacy of world events between 1939 and 1945 (to periodise crudely) in the post -1945 period. And it was Plato (inter alios) that offered a way of thinking through the ancient and modern tragedies inflicted during the first half of the twentieth century.'(DANIEL ORRELLS in The Classical Review (New Series), 2009, p.60). From the library of Professor Carl Deroux.

Seller Inventory # 47358

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Postmodern Spiritual Practices. The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault.
• Publisher: Ohio State University Press
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814210708
• ISBN 13: 9780814210703
• Binding: Hardcover

About this title

Synopsis

Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, by Paul Allen Miller, argues that a key element of postmodern French intellectual life has been the reception of Plato. This fact has gone underappreciated in the Anglophone world due to a fundamental division in culture. Until very recently, the concerns of academic philosophy and philology have had little in common. On the one hand, this is due to analytic philosophy’s self-confinement to questions of epistemology, speech act theory, and philosophy of science. As such, it has had little to say about the relation between antique and contemporary modes of thought.
On the other hand, blindness to the merits of postmodern thought is also due to Anglo-American philology’s own parochial instincts. Ensconced within a nineteenth-century model of Alterumswissenschaft, only a minority of classicists have made forays into philosophical, psychoanalytic, and other speculative modes of inquiry. The result has been that postmodern French thought has largely been the province of scholars of modern languages. 
A situation thus emerges in which most classicists do not know theory, and so cannot appreciate the scope of these thinkers’ contribution to our understanding of the genealogy of Western thought, while most theorists do not know the Platonic texts and their contexts that ground them. This book bridges this gap, offering detailed and theoretically informed readings of French postmodernism’s chief thinkers’ debts to Plato and the ancient world.

About the Author

Paul Allen Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina.