Description
Book SynopsisParadise has shaped our poetic and religious imagination and informed literary and theological accounts of man's relation with his creator, with language and history. Doueihi contemplates the philosophical reception and uses of Paradise, marked by the rise of critical and historical methods in the Early Modern period.
Trade ReviewAnyone who wants to understand the ethical turn in modern philosophy, or the intellectual roots of the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, needs to read Doueihi's account of the philosophical conditions under which our ideas of paradise developed and were at last overthrown. In this lucid study, beautifully translated by Jane Marie Todd, Milad Doueihi, argues that while the earthly paradise belongs to myth, it is a myth around which our most vital thinking continually turns. -- Gordon Teskey, Harvard University
Milad Doueihi's beautiful book does not seek to lift the mystery over earthly paradise. He shows, with select erudition, how this history prior to history informs the foundations of modernity. This modernity, while it is inaugurated with a contestation of the authority of the Bible, inherits and depends upon the same Biblical categories it seeks to undermine. -- Fabrice Hadjaj * Art Press *
Milad Doueihi's essay shows that a theological and erudite past can rejoin, through singular ways reconstructed here, some of the essential interrogations of our present. Although our sense of modernity may suffer from it, there are living cultural units that only mastered erudition, and the subtlety of analysis, allow us to reconstruct in their slow but certain elaboration. -- Jean Marie Goulemot * La quinzaine littéraire *
Table of Contents* Contents * Acknowledgments * Preface * A Few Adamic Difficulties * Burlesque Diversions and Serious Amusements * The Return of the Manichaeans * Paradise between Politics and Freedom * Philosopher without Paradise * Paradise of Reason * God's Hell * By Way of Conclusion * Notes * Authors Cited * Index
