The Highway of Despair : Critical Theory After Hegel / Robyn Marasco.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Marasco, Robyn, author.

Series:

New directions in critical theory.

New Directions in Critical Theory

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich.

Criticism (Philosophy).

Critical theory.

Dialectic.

Despair.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (241 p.)

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Columbia University Press, [2015]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Hegel's "highway of despair," introduced in his Phenomenology of Spirit, represents the tortured path traveled by "natural consciousness" on its way to freedom. Despair, the passionate residue of Hegelian critique, also indicates fugitive opportunities for freedom and preserves the principle of hope against all hope. Analyzing the works of an eclectic cast of thinkers, Robyn Marasco considers the dynamism of despair as a critical passion, reckoning with the forms of historical life forged along Hegel's highway. The Highway of Despair follows Theodor Adorno, Georges Bataille, and Frantz Fanon as they each read, resist, and reconfigure a strand of thought in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Confronting the twentieth-century collapse of a certain revolutionary dialectic, these thinkers struggle to revalue critical philosophy and recast Left Hegelianism within the contexts of genocidal racism, world war, and colonial domination. Each thinker also re-centers the role of passion in critique. Arguing against more recent trends in critical theory that promise an escape from despair, Marasco shows how passion frustrates the resolutions of reason and faith. Embracing the extremism of what Marx, in the spirit of Hegel, called the "ruthless critique of everything existing," she affirms the contemporary purchase of radical critical theory, resulting in a passionate approach to political thought.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART 1. DIALECTICS AND DESPAIR

1. Hegel, the Wound

2. Kierkegaard's Diagnostics

PART 2. DIALECTICAL REMAINS

3. Theodor W. Adorno: Aporetics

4. Georges Bataille: Aleatory Dialectics

5. Frantz Fanon: Critique, with Knives

Concluding Postscript

Notes

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

ISBN:

9780231538893

0231538898

OCLC:

979904336