Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction: Intellectuals, World Disorder, and the Politics of Empire

ISBN-13: 9783319889894 / Angielski / Miękka / 2019 / 171 str.

Christopher Britt; Paul Fenn; Eduardo Subirats

O autorze

Christopher Britt is Associate Professor at The George Washington University, USA. He is the author of Quixotism: The Imaginative Denial of Spain’s Loss of Empire (2005) and of Imperial Idiocy: A Reflection on Forced Displacement in the Americas (Forthcoming: 2017).

Paul Fenn is the leader of the Community Choice Energy movement to localize energy in the United States. He is the author of several hallmark U.S. laws (California AB117, 2002; Massachusetts Chapter 164; San Francisco Charter Section 9.107.8, 2001; Oakland Measure X, 1998); primary architect of implemented policies to localize and democratize energy (San Francisco, 2013, Sonoma County, 2014); and author of numerous published essays.

Eduardo Subirats is Professor at New York University, USA. He is the author of some forty books in Spanish, as well as many articles in Spanish, German, English, and Portuguese. His main books deal with topics of aesthetics, cultural theory, colonialism, and literary theory.

Blurb

This book is about the ways in which modern enlightenment, rather than liberating humanity from tyranny, has subjected us to new servitude imposed by systems of mass manipulation, electronic vigilance, compulsive consumerism, and the horrors of a seemingly unending global war on terror. In a time when national democracies seem an imperial farce, it is not enough for intellectuals faced with all this destruction to blithely recommend resistance. Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction challenges resistance theory, providing a cosmology of enlightenment that regards it as an unstable epiphenomenon. The authors outline the current "English" enlightenment of Pax Americana, and provides an epistemological theory and demonstration: a derivative of Adorno's negative dialectics in a positive dialectic based upon intellectual participation in civil society. The book thus ties American, British, French and German theoretical traditions into a reflexive challenge to the notion of intellectual as critic, and argues instead for a trespassive tradition of cultural leadership.