Description
Book SynopsisElizabeth S. Anker contends that the faith in the logic of paradox has been the watermark of left intellectualism since the second half of the twentieth century, showing how paradox generates the very exclusions it critiques and undercuts theory's commitment to social justice.
Trade Review“The novelty of [Anker’s] approach is to identify theory’s style of thought with a fatal attraction to paradox, to something that appears absurd or contradictory but is actually true. . . . Anker illuminates both why theory has migrated so effectively beyond the academy and also how its self-replicating endlessness gives a startling large-scale intellectual uniformity to the pronouncements of elite institutions and right-wing conspiracists alike.” -- Michael W. Clune * Los Angeles Review of Books *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction: On Paradox 1
1. All That Is Solid Melts into Paradox: The Idea of Modernity 29
2. Ontologizing the Paradoxes of Rights, or the Anti-legalism of Theory 73
Interlude. Anatomy of Paradox, or a Brief History of Aesthetic Theory 112
3. Redeeming Rights, or the Ethics and Politics of Paradox 138
4. The Politics of Exclusion 181
5. The Pedagogy of Paradox 221
Interlude. A Different Kind of Theory 261
6. What Holds Things Together: Toward an Integrative Criticism 266
Notes 313
Bibliography 335
Index
