Overview

From their decisive emergence in the late eighteenth century, modernity and modern politics were long haunted by irony and paradox. Ours, however, is the age of the implosion of modernity. Modernity has degenerated into self-parody. The polarities that an ironic grasp of it could potentially always hold in tension are finally collapsing into each other. In Modernity and the Political Fix, Andrew Gibson tells the relevant story and asks what aspects of modern politics we might want to salvage and preserve and within what structure we might continue thinking about them. His answer is that these questions call for the isolation of a particular set of concepts; that, rightly positioned in relation to one another, the concepts amount to a political theology; that the very formulation of political temporality is therefore at stake; and that the thinking in question has been and is best represented in modern philosophy and art, above all, modern literature. Ranging through early modern and modern thought from Hobbes, Pascal and Leibniz to Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard to Foucault, Lacan, Badiou, Jambet and Rancière, and in modern literature and art from Wordsworth and Byron to Goya and Wagner, Huysmans and Wilde, Joyce and Woolf, Joseph Roth, Vicki Baum, Gabriele Tergit and the Weimar novel, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell to R.S. Thomas and Norman Nicholson, Gibson seeks to compile a modern political aide-memoire, a treasury for a politics to come.

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9781350212541

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Reviews

It is to be recommended for its expansiveness, generosity and singular orientation ... A unique and insightful work. Its central theses deserve to be respected. * Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy * For those looking to better understand the specificity of our current 'political predicament' ... a bounty of riches awaits. * James Joyce Broadsheet * Heeding vast amounts of historical, literary and conceptual work, Gibson weaves a compelling narrative that enlists thinking modalities from a wide variety of genres. What is especially important about Gibson’s framing of the investigation is that in turning to the idea of “ironical modernity” the book challenges Richard Rorty’s stultifying assertion that irony is alien to political commitment. Politics and irony are intimately interconnected for Gibson, precisely because he embraces a politics that accepts historical contingency as much as it does the contingencies of subjectivity. Crucially Gibson embraces a political theology that is yet to come. He focuses on how we can enrich our political grasp of modernity to elaborate a theologically-influenced conception of historical or human time “without finality.” -- Michael Shapiro, Professor of Political Science, University of Hawai’i, USA Andrew Gibson’s is a very significant book – a cultural intervention in the Nietzschean vein and, at times, manner. Paradoxically, it proposes a political theology that is resolutely secular, but justifies its resort to the materials of theology; in other words, it finesses the commonplace argument that modern political thought is necessarily if unwittingly and, in defiance of its own resolutions to the contrary, theological. It is a profound and passionate meditation on modernism – its achievements as well as its discontents – and I recommend it without reservation. -- Martin Dzelzainis, Professor of Renaissance Literature and Thought, University of Leicester, UK

Heeding vast amounts of historical, literary and conceptual work, Gibson weaves a compelling narrative that enlists thinking modalities from a wide variety of genres. What is especially important about Gibson's framing of the investigation is that in turning to the idea of ironical modernity the book challenges Richard Rorty's stultifying assertion that irony is alien to political commitment. Politics and irony are intimately interconnected for Gibson, precisely because he embraces a politics that accepts historical contingency as much as it does the contingencies of subjectivity. Crucially Gibson embraces a political theology that is yet to come. He focuses on how we can enrich our political grasp of modernity to elaborate a theologically-influenced conception of historical or human time without finality. -- Michael Shapiro, Professor of Political Science, University of Hawai'i, USA Andrew Gibson's is a very significant book - a cultural intervention in the Nietzschean vein and, at times, manner. Paradoxically, it proposes a political theology that is resolutely secular, but justifies its resort to the materials of theology; in other words, it finesses the commonplace argument that modern political thought is necessarily if unwittingly and, in defiance of its own resolutions to the contrary, theological. It is a profound and passionate meditation on modernism - its achievements as well as its discontents - and I recommend it without reservation. -- Martin Dzelzainis, Professor of Renaissance Literature and Thought, University of Leicester, UK

Author Information

Andrew Gibson was Research Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, where he still teaches part-time. He is currently Visiting Professor at the J.M. Coetzee Centre at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and was until recently a member of the Conseil Scientifique of the Collège Internationale de Philosophie in Paris. His many books include Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Contemporary French Philosophy (2012) and Misanthropy (Bloomsbury, 2017).

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