Theory and the Common from Marx to Badiou 2009th Edition
Author(s): P. McGee (Author)
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Publication Date: May 19, 2009
Edition: 2009th
Language: English
Print length: 223 pages
ISBN-10: 0230615252
ISBN-13: 9780230615250
Book Description
Challenging contemporary academic and intellectual culture, Patrick McGee writes experimentally about a series of thinkers who ruptured linguistic and social hierarchies: Marx, Nietzsche, Wilde, Lawrence, Gramsci, Wittgenstein, Bourdieu, Derrida, and Badiou. His method combines analysis, memoir, and polemic and is aimed particularly at students and teachers in the field of cultural studies. Influenced by Alain Badiou’s Logiques des mondes, McGee uses his personal relation to theory and its institutions, not excluding his own ressentiment, to explore how thought enters a “common” existence as an event that can transform the individual life by transforming a world.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Theory and the Common from Marx to Badiou is a book of extraordinary intellectual and theoretical sophistication, which works as a moving and an erudite discussion of a whole series of key ideas and thinkers in critical theory. McGee has also written a book that is both a heartfelt call for a more egalitarian university system and a passionate account of his own life.”–Enda Duffy,Professor, Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara
From the Author
From the author’s Preface:”As a work in progress, the title of this book was “The Importance of Being Common,” with two possible subtitles: either “Theory from the Underground” or “A Personal Journey through Theory.” These titles suggest the book’s hybridity as a work of critical thought and an intellectual memoir. Some readers may question the personal and even eccentric approach to the history of theory and the thought of common sense that this book lays out in a nonchronological order. For myself, I must confess that theory has always been a very personal thing. I came to it because I found answers–however provisional and hypothetical–to questions life imposed on me without my consent. There has never been anything neutral about my relation to theory, which has led me to question the significance of particular interests, including my own. I wrote this book for anyone who cares to read about theory from the perspective of someone who is not a master. I wrote it especially for academics and students who feel sometimes that the whole game of academic discourse is a masquerade that hides the one thing you really want to say. I’m not calling for an end to the masquerade. I only want the recognition that the truth may not be the face behind the mask but the mask behind the face.”
About the Author
PATRICK McGEE was McElveen Professor and then Read Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA. Now a retired Emeritus Professor, he lives in Seattle.
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