Description: Advocates a new existential and political coalition among critical and postmodern social theorists and among critical gender, race, and class theorists, in dissent from the New World Order, to raise specters of liberation and empower radical democratic change.
Brief description: Martin J. Beck Matustik is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. He is the author of Postnational Identity: Critical Theory and Existential Philosophy in Habermas, Kierkegaard, and Havel, and coeditor, with Merold Westphal, of Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity. Matustik left Prague for political reasons in 1977, and after eight months in an Austrian refugee camp immigrated to the United States. As a Fulbright Fellow in Germany, he studied with Jurgen Habermas during revolutionary events of 1989-1991.
Review Quotes:
"Matustik's Specters draws on a wide range of thinkers to develop perspectives on contemporary prospects for liberation and struggle. Overcoming sterile polemics between modern and postmodern theorists, Matustik shows that both traditions contribute to analyzing and surmounting situations of suffering and distress throughout the globe." -- Douglas Kellner, The University of Texas at Austin
"The strength of this volume is its thesis: that dissent is possible against the New World Order through an appeal to a marriage of critical theory and philosophy of existence. Although the author has espoused this thesis in an earlier work, he has updated the discussion and shifted the lens through which it is seen--namely, the liberatory critical thought of, among others, Marcuse and Fanon. The book is at its theoretical best, in fact, when the author engages this dynamic and pursues its influence on contemporary theorists such as Cornel West, Lucius Outlaw, Drucilla Cornell, and Iris Marion Young." -- Lewis Gordon, Brown University
"In this era of lowered expectations, Martin Matustik pricks the conscience of critical theorists and postmodernists to settle for nothing less than human liberation." -- Iris M. Young, University of Pittsburgh