Description
Book SynopsisDominick LaCapra''s History and Its Limits articulates the relations among intellectual history, cultural history, and critical theory, examining the recent rise of Practice Theory and probing the limitations of prevalent forms of humanism. LaCapra focuses on the problem of understanding extreme cases, specifically events and experiences involving violence and victimization. He asks how historians treat and are simultaneously implicated in the traumatic processes they attempt to represent. In addressing these questions, he also investigates violence''s impact on various types of writing and establishes a distinctive role for critical theory in the face of an insufficiently discriminating aesthetic of the sublime (often unreflectively amalgamated with the uncanny).
In History and Its Limits, LaCapra inquires into the related phenomenon of a turn to the postsecular, even the messianic or the miraculous, in recent theoretical discussions of extreme events by such prominent figure
Trade Review
In his most recent collection of essays, the eminent intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra reconfirms his place as one of the most incisive and theoretically sophisticated scholars in the humanities today. All of the essays in one way or another address a general problem that has preoccupied LaCapra for many years, namely, how can the discipline of history open itself with greater effect toward a more expansive and theoretically informed awareness of its own methods, its present limits, and its future possibilities? In our ongoing and collective explorations of what the call to intensified criticism might mean, the historical profession has no better guide than LaCapra.
-- Peter E. Gordon * Journal of Modern History *
Table of ContentsIntroduction1. Articulating Intellectual History, Cultural History, and Critical Theory2. Vicissitudes of Practice and Theory3. " Traumatropisms": From Trauma via Witnessing to the Sublime?\4. Toward a Critique of Violence5. Heidegger, Violence, and the Origin of the Work of Art6. Reopening the Question of the Human and the Animal7. Tropisms of Intellectual HistoryIndex
