Modernity and the Political Fix (Political Theologies)

by Andrew Gibson (Author)

• New

  Hardcover
  2019

  $169.36

  From its decisive emergence with the French Revolution in 1789, modernity has always been a phenomenon haunted by ironies and contradictions. Radical late-eighteenth-century transformations in thought developed both the form and content of art and politics over the next two hundred years. A specifically modern frame of mind emerged, influencing the forms in which human intellectual life expresses itself. But what does modernity mean to us, politically, philosophically and culturally, in our contemporary age? In Modernity and the Political Fix, Andrew Gibson asks precisely what aspects of this modern politics we might want to salvage and preserve, within what structure we might seek to continue thinking them. His answer is firstly, that these questions call for a new political theology and secondly, that it is necessary to think through this question using modern philosophy and theory, literature and the arts. Ranging through early modern and modern philosophy and theory, this book examines thinkers from Hobbes, Pascal and Leibniz, to Rousseau and Kant, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, Foucault and Lacan, and Badiou, Jambet and Ranciere. In modern literature and art, it explores a breadth of contributions from Wordsworth and Byron, Goya and Wagner, Huysmans and Wilde, Joyce and Woolf, Joseph Roth, Gabriele Tergit and the Weimar novel, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell, R.S. Thomas and Norman Nicholson. Gibson illuminates the dilemmas of modern consciousness and the political and demonstrates the inseparability of literature, art and philosophy within European modernity.