Search results for ""Author Christopher Norris""
Lawrence & Wishart Ltd Reclaiming Truth: Contribution to a Critique of Cultural Relativism
We live in a world where questions of truth and of falsehood are left increasingly unattended. Such questions are often replaced by a relativism which allows any group the right to assert their values with impunity. Should, however, stories from an event such as the Holocaust be given equal truth status to neo-Nazi claims that it never happened? This book is a polemical warning against a too easy rejection of the standards of truth and value in the modern world, and is a further sortie in Christopher Norris's prolonged battle with the wilder side of postmodernism. Christopher Norris makes a timely reassessment of the cultural theorist Louis Althusser, and also makes a political case for Jacques Derrida whose "deconstruction" techniques are described as a useful tool when up against the rhetorical gestures of those theorists, such as Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty, who are trapped in the postmodern playpen. The book should be of interest to any student of contemporary philosophy, critical theory and politics, and should be a contribution to the debate that is currently dominated by conservative thinkers. Christopher Norris is the author of "The Deconstructive Turn", Jacques Derrida", "What's Wrong with Postmodernism" and "Uncritical Theory: Intellectuals, Politics and the Gulf War".
£16.00
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory
This book offers a detailed account of Spinoza's influence on various schools of present-day critical thought. That influence extends from Althusserian Marxism to hermeneutics, deconstruction, narrative poetics, new historicism, and the unclassifiable writings of a thinker like Giles Deleuze. The author combines a close exegesis of Spinoza's texts with a series of chapters that trace the evolution of literary theory from its period of high scientific rigour in the mid-1960s to its latest "postmodern", neopragmatist or anti-theoretical phase. He examines the thought of Althusser, Macherey and Deleuze as well as others (including the new historicists) who have registered the impact of his pioneering work without any overt acknowledgement. On the one hand, theorists like Althusser and Macherey could celebrate Spinoza as the first philosopher before Marx to understand the need for a riorous distinction between science (or "theoretical practice") and ideology (or the realm of lived experience subject to various forms of imaginary error of misrecognition). On the other, Deleuze makes Spinoza the hero of his crusade against theories of whatever kind - Kantian, Marxist, Freudian, post structuralist - which always end up by imposing some abstract order of concepts and categories on the libidinal flux of "desiring production", or the "body-without-organs" of anarchic instinctual drives.
£36.95