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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning) > Discourse analysis
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What Happened in the Twentieth Century?: Towards a Critique of Extremist Reason (Paperback)
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What Happened in the Twentieth Century?: Towards a Critique of Extremist Reason (Paperback)
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When we look back from the vantage point of the 21st century and
ask ourselves what the previous century was all about, what do we
see? Our first inclination is to focus on historical events: the
20th century was the age of two devastating world wars, of
totalitarian regimes and terrible atrocities like the Holocaust -
"the age of extremes," to use Hobsbawm's famous phrase. But in this
new book, the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk argues that we will
never understand the 20th century if we focus on events and
ideologies. Rather, in his view, the predominant motif of the 20th
century is what Badiou called a passion for the real, which
manifests itself as the will to actualize the truth directly in the
here and now. Drawing on his Spheres trilogy, Sloterdijk interprets
the actualization of the real in the 20th century as a passion for
economic and technological "antigravitation". The rise of
consumerism and the easing of the burdens of human life by the
constant deployment of new technologies have killed off the kind of
radicalism that was rooted in the belief that power would rise from
a material base of production. If the 20th century can still
inspire us today, it is because the fundamental shift that it
brought about opened the way for a critique of extremist reason, a
post-Marxist theory of enrichment and a general economy of energy
resources based on excess and dissipation. While developing his
highly original interpretation of the 20th century, Sloterdijk also
addresses a series of related topics including the meaning of the
Anthropocene, the domestication of humans and the significance of
the sea. The volume also includes major new pieces on Derrida and
on Heidegger's politics. This work, by one of the most original
thinkers today will appeal to students and scholars across the
humanities and social sciences, as well as anyone interested in
philosophy and critical theory.
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