Dis-orientations Philosophy, Literature and the Lost Grounds of Modernity [Hardcover]

This is a carefully put together and astonishingly coherent collection of insightful philosophical?reflections on how major Modern thinkers and writers oriented themselves in a thoroughly disoriented world, where all metaphysical grounding had lost its footing and nothing could have been taken for granted. A vast and illuminating scope of essays, ranging from Novalis to Kundera, from Heidegger to Platonov, from Kierkegaard to Benjamin, this volume is an invaluable contribution to understanding Modernity at its existential best.A thought-provoking and compelling inquiry into the predicaments of our times, Dis-orientations challenges us to see a gain rather than a loss in the modern loss of groundsA provocative collection of essays exploring disorientation as the moving force of the present. Reflecting on disorientation in thought, in existence, in being, and in language, these essays examine the theoretical challenges of thinking our present situation of suspension, hovering, homelessness, and exile that have emerged from the lost grounds of modernity.This is an edited collection of original essays that combine philosophy, phenomenology, and literature to reflect on modern ideas about orientation and disorientation, grounds and groundlessness.This highly original collection of essays contributes to a critique of the common understanding of modernity as an enlightened project that provides rational grounds for orientation in all aspects and dimensions of the world. An international team of contributors contend that the modern principles of foundation show in themselves rather how modernity is disorienting itself.The book brings together discussions on the writings of philosophers who treat more systematically the questions of foundation and orientation, such as Kant, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Pascal, and Pato1ka, and studies of literary works that explicitly thematize this question, such as Novalis, H?lderlin, Beckett, Platonov, and Benjamin. This multi-discilC]