Overview

Roland V�gső opens up a new debate in favour of abandoning the very idea of the world in both philosophy and politics. Opening with a reconsideration of the Heideggerian critique of worldlessness, he goes on to trace the overlooked history of this argument in the works of Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou. This critical genealogy shows that the post-Heideggerian critique of the phenomenological tradition remained limited by its unquestioning investment in the category of the 'world'. As a way out of this historical predicament, V�gs� encourages us to create affirmative definitions of worldlessness.

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9781474457613

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"As Heraclitus once said, to suppose the world was not already beautiful and orderly, without the aid of reason, would turn it into nothing but a pile of garbage. Drawing on this fundamentally anti-Platonic theme, V�gső reveals that the gesture shared by many post-war philosophies is the reduction of the possibilities of ""worldlessness"" into an unquestionably negative category, thereby foreclosing the positive attitudes of approaching the manner in which the world worlds today. In response, V�gső proposes a unique and timely approach to affirming the conditions of worldlessness as the ""limit-experience"" of contemporary philosophy.-- ""Gregg Lambert, Syracuse University"""

Author Information

Roland V�gs� is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of The Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture (Fordham University Press, 2013). He is co-editor of Life After Literature: Constructions of Life in Literature and Theory (Springer, forthcoming).

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