Histories of Postmodernism [Paperback]

Histories of Postmodernismreexamines the history of the constellation of ideas and thinkers associated with postmodernism. The increasingly dominant historical narrative depicts a relatively smooth development of ideas from Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, through a range of French theorists, most notably Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, to contemporary American thinkers such as Richard Rorty, Edward Said, and Judith Butler. Histories of Postmodernismchallenges this narrative by highlighting the local contexts of relevant theorists and thus the crucial distinctions that divide successive articulations of the themes and concepts associated with postmodernism. As postmodern ideas traveled from nineteenth-century Germany to mid-twentieth-century France and on to the contemporary United States, so the relevant theorists transformed that heritage within the context of particular intellectual traditions and specific political and aesthetic issues.

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Introduction: Histories of Postmodernism

Mark Bevir, Jill Hargis, and Sara Rushing

Chapter 2: Honesty as the Best Policy: Nietzsche on Redlichkeitand the contrast between Stoic and Epicurean strategies of the self

Melissa Lane

Chapter 3: Escape from the Subject: Heideggers Das Man and Being-in-the-world

Jill Hargis

Chapter 4: A Rock and a Hard Place: Althusser, Structuralism, Communism and the Death

of the Anticapitalist Left

Robert Resch

Chapter 5: Hammer without a Master: French Phenomenology and the Origins of

Deconstruction (Or, How Derrida Read Heidegger)

Peter Eli Gordon

Chapter 6: A Kind of Radicality: The Avant-garde Legacy in Postmodern Ethics

Mark Bevir