Description
Book SynopsisConsiders how a culture of crisis management - what the author calls "the new chronic" - has come to dominate various aspects of contemporary life, from biomedicine to economics to politics. This title unravels the logic of the new chronic where people find themselves suspended in a space between life and death.
Trade Review“Cazdyn’s treatise is provocative, creative, and intelligent, calling for no less than a global revolution in action and ideology. Anchored in American events and history, it also has much to offer at the international level, and it will be a welcome companion to a wide range of curricula in the humanities, medical, and social sciences.” - Lawrence C. Rubin,
Journal of American Culture"In
The Already Dead, Eric Cazdyn establishes what he calls a nonmoralizing critique of capitalism, starting from the premise that crisis does not symptomize the failure of the system but rather its proper functioning. He is committed to a systemic, radical critique that keeps open the possibilities of revolution. This is a bracing and provocative book, both ideationally and stylistically."—
Rei Terada, University of California, Irvine
"This immensely ambitious and unclassifiable theoretical work begins by projecting a new kind of temporality—the new chronic—out of medical practice, in order to range across the political, the cultural, the national, the autobiographical, and the economic, touching in passing on film and globalization, and in the process unearthing new life forms: the already dead, the always dead, and the always already dead. It is an exciting journey."—
Fredric Jameson, Duke University
“Cazdyn’s treatise is provocative, creative, and intelligent, calling for no less than a global revolution in action and ideology. Anchored in American events and history, it also has much to offer at the international level, and it will be a welcome companion to a wide range of curricula in the humanities, medical, and social sciences.” -- Lawrence C. Rubin * Journal of American Culture *
“While it is not the only reason to read the book, it is the performance itself, the manner in which Cazdyn artfully combines three areas of study and speaks of them in parallel with one another, that is most valuable, no matter the discipline to which the reader belongs. Cazdyn invokes a system that is both utopian (in its impossible future – the American Dream is always just a step away) and pre-apocalyptic.” -- Valérie Savard * Science Fiction Film and Television *
“Cazdyn covers a dizzying array of examples of the way this shift has become normalized–drawn from popular culture, cinema, and literature. One must pause to marvel at the facility with which he melds such analysis with moving personal essays.” -- Kurt Newman * U.S. Intellectual History Blog *
“This book is a roller-coaster ride through a broad swath of cultural studies, psychoanalysis and the social sciences—from the relationship of the chronic subject to phenomena in capitalism, biopolitics and global formations, and from trends in medicine to descriptions of how death and life are brought together in the literary and psychoanalytic imagination.” -- Sharon R. Kaufman * Culture, Health & Sexuality *
“
The Already Dead comes at a critical moment in which the vulgarities of the global capitalist system have become increasingly difficult to conceal. The book’s approach, at once theoretical and personal, historical and cultural, seeks new modes of revolutionary consciousness that can destabilize both within and without the capitalist system so as to reconfigure everything.” -- Adam Broinowski * Reviews in Cultural Theory *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Part 1. The New Chronic 13
Part 2. The Global Abyss 99
Part 3. The Already Dead 159
Notes 205
Selected Bibliography 217
Index 221
