Description:
This book offers a series of probing reflections on issues at the heart of recent debates in philosophy, literary theory, and intellectual history. In ten powerfully articulated essays, Richard Wolin calls into question the implied radicalism of the so-called postmodern turn, exposes the unstated agenda of neoconservative cultural theory, and provides a major reinterpretation of Walter Benjamin's place in contemporary cultural studies.
At the center of the book lie the peculiar and troubling affinities between two groups of cultural critics usually seen as antithetical: the radical conservative thinkers of Germany's Weimar Republic and the French poststructuralists who came to the prominence in the aftermath of the May 1968 uprising.
Wolin concludes the volume with a cogent reappraisal of "antihumanism" as a leitmotif of postwar French intellectual culture, along with a reassessment of the "de Man affair" and its implications for the poststructuralist interpretation of fascism.
Review Quotes:
"As always, Richard Wolin's work is certain to provoke as much controversy as it lays to rest. One of the most outspoken defenders of the tradition of enlightenment humanism now so much under attack, he courageously takes the battle to the home territory of its enemies on the left and right. Labyrinths powerfully testifies to the persistence of intellectual engagement in an era of cynical exhaustion."--Martin Jay, University of California, Berkley
"Wolin has become an important interpreter of what might be called the ideological interface between twentieth-century French and German social thought, as well as between various modernist and postmodernist agendas. This volume reflects his broad command and critical voice very effectively."--Michael P. Steinberg, Cornell University