Description: "Many human beings have considered the powers and the limits of human knowledge, but few have wondered about the power that the idea of knowledge has over us. Steven Connor's The Madness of Knowledge is the first book to investigate this emotional inner life of knowledge - the lusts, fantasies, dreams, and fears that the idea of knowing provokes. There are in-depth discussions of the imperious will to know, of Freud's epistemophilia (or love of knowledge), and the curiously insistent links between madness, magical thinking, and the desire for knowledge. Connor also probes secrets and revelations, quarreling and the history of quizzes and "general knowledge," charlatanry and pretension, both the violent disdain and the sanctification of the stupid, as well as the emotional investment in the spaces and places of knowledge, from the study to the library. In an age of artificial intelligence, alternative facts, and mistrust of truth, The Madness of Knowledge offers an opulent, enlarging, and sometimes unnerving psychopathology of intellectual life."--Jacket flap.
Brief description: Steven Connor is professor of English and director of research at the Digital Futures Institute, King's College London. He is the author of more than twenty books.
Review Quotes: "The Madness of Knowledge challenges the casual belief that there is a thing 'out there, ' solid and observable, which we more or less manage to cram into our brains. . . . Connor's argument--regardless of their truth, our beliefs about knowledge operate in a world of fantasy--is in itself both clear and convincing."-- "Times Literary Supplement"