Description
Book SynopsisExamines the theoretical and philosophical contours of the modern era. The book traces the contemporary critiques of modernity back to their philosophical origins in the work of Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger and others.
Table of ContentsIntroduction by Thomas McCarthy vii
Preface xix
I Modernity's Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self-Reassurance 1
II Hegel's Concept of Modernity 23
Excursus on Schiller's" Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man" 45
III Three Perspectives: Left Hegelians, Right Hegelians, and Nietzsche 51
Excursus on the Obsolescence of the Production Paradigm 75
IV The Entry into Postmodernity: Nietzsche as a Turning Point 83
V The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno 106
VI The Undermining of Western Rationalism through the Critique of Metaphysics: Martin Heidegger 131
VII Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jacques Derrida's Critique of Phonocentrism 161
Excursus on Leveling the Genre Distinction between Philosophy and Literature 185
VIII Between Eroticism and General Economics: Georges Bataille 211
IX The Critique of Reason as an Unmasking of the Human Sciences: Michel Foucault 238
X Some Questions Concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again 266
XI An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative versus Subject- Centered Reason 294
Excursus on Cornelius Castoriadis: The Imaginary Institution 327
XII The Normative Content of Modernity 336
Excursus on Luhmann's Appropriation of the Philosophy of the Subject through Systems Theory 368
Notes 386
Name Index 423
Subject and Title Index 427
