Unhuman Culture Daniel Cottom ""Uhuman Culture" takes the
categories of the person and the Other, the human and culture, and
questions whether their opposition is as fixed as we would think.
In particular, Cottom is interested in how language and art animate
the human. Our tendency to think and write passionately about the
art we make leads him to criticize our 'perennial and perhaps
inescapable tendency to underestimate the art in humanity and
overestimate the humanity of art.' At issue in this clever chiasmus
is the lack of difference separating the human from the
unhuman."--"Bloomsbury Review" It is widely acknowledged that the
unhuman plays a significant role in the definition of humanity in
contemporary thought. It appears in the thematization of "the
Other" in philosophical, psychoanalytic, anthropological, and
postcolonial studies, and shows up in the "antihumanism" associated
with figures such as Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida. One might
trace its genealogy, as Freud did, to the Copernican, Darwinian,
and psychoanalytic revolutions that displaced humanity from the
center of the universe. Or as Karl Marx and others suggested, one
might lose human identity in the face of economic, technological,
political, and ideological forces and structures. With dazzling
breadth, wit, and intelligence, "Unhuman Culture" ranges over
literature, art, and theory, ancient to postmodern, to explore the
ways in which contemporary culture defines humanity in terms of all
that it is not. Daniel Cottom is equally at home reading medieval
saints' lives and the fiction of Angela Carter, plumbing the
implications of Napoleon's self-coronation and the attacks of 9/11,
considering the paintings of Pieter Bruegel and the
plastic-surgery-as-performance of the body artist Orlan. For
Cottom, the unhuman does not necessarily signify the "in"human, in
the sense of conspicuous or extraordinary cruelty. It embraces,
too, the superhuman, the supernatural, the demonic, and the
subhuman; the supposedly disjunctive animal, vegetable, and mineral
kingdoms; the realms of artifice, technology, and fantasy. It plays
a role in theoretical discussions of the sublime, personal memoirs
of the Holocaust, aesthetic reflections on technology, economic
discourses on globalization, and popular accounts of terrorism.
Whereas it once may have seemed that the concept of culture always,
by definition, pertained to humanity, it now may seem impossible to
avoid the realization that we must look at things differently. It
is not only art, in the narrow sense of the word, that we must
recognize as unhuman. For better or worse, ours is now an unhuman
culture. Daniel Cottom is the David A. Burr Chair of Letters at the
University of Oklahoma. Among his books are "Ravishing Tradition:
Cultural Forces and Literary History," "Cannibals and Philosophers:
Bodies of Enlightenment," and "Why Education Is Useless," the
latter also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
2006 216 pages 6 x 9 18 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-3956-0 Cloth $45.00s
29.50 ISBN 978-0-8122-0169-7 Ebook $45.00s 29.50 World Rights
Cultural Studies Short copy: Through a wide-ranging study of
literature, art, and philosophy, Daniel Cottom explains why ours is
an unhuman culture and how this culture still gives us reason for
hope.
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