Description
Book SynopsisFrom Plato's contempt for the madness of the multitude to Kant's lament for the great unthinking mass, the history of Western thought is riddled with disdain for ordinary collective life. But it was not until Kierkegaard developed the term chatter that this disdain began to focus on the ordinary communicative practiceswhich sustain this form of human togetherness. The Chattering Mind explores the intellectual tradition inaugurated by Kierkegaard's work, tracing the conceptual history of everyday talk from his formative account of chatter to Heidegger's recuperative discussion of idle talk to Lacan's culminating treatment of empty speech--and ultimately into our digital present, where small talk on various social media platforms now yields big data for tech-savvy entrepreneurs. In this sense, The Chattering Mind is less a history of ideas than a book in search of a usable past. It is a study of how the modern world became anxious about everyday talk, figured in terms of the intelle
