Description: This book brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines including philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the conceptual foundations of the humanitiesand the question of their future. What notions of the future, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties about the humanities in our current geopolitical situation? How can we think about the unpredictable and unthought dimensions of praxis implicit in the very notion of futurity? The volume should be required reading for all who feel a deep commitment to the humanities, its practices, and its future.
Brief description: TIM DEAN is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Humanities Institute at the University at Buffalo.
Review Quotes: While arbitrary and dire decisions about our planet are made every day by presidents, generals, bankers and CEOs, those who work in the humanities have a role to play--first, that of caring for words and their nuances, like the difference between "futurity" and "the future," "historicity" and "history," and then, by questioning their applications to current issues. All these vibrant essays, written by some of the finest minds of today's academia, suggest that the spatial closure that transforms the world into a global prison of sameness not only can but must be undone by a rupture ushered in by the heterogeneity of "futurity." Such a new future, less a tense or a time-span than a mode of critical examination, still rhymes with "new styles of architecture," and still hopes to bring about a much needed "change of heart."-----Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania