The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages

On the Unwritten History of Theory

Auteur: Cole, Andrew; Smith, D. Vance; Fish, Stanley; Jameson, Fredric
Éditeur: Duke University Press
Collection: Post-Contemporary Interventions
ISBN: 9780822346524
eISBN Pdf: 9780822392545
Lieu de publication: Durham , United States
Année de publication électronique: 2010
Mois : Février
Pages: 288
DDC: 189
Langue: Anglais

Légende

This collection of essays argues that any valid theory of the modern should—indeed must—reckon with the medieval. Offering a much-needed correction to theorists such as Hans Blumenberg, who in his Legitimacy of the Modern Age describes the "modern age" as a complete departure from the Middle Ages, these essays forcefully show that thinkers from Adorno to Žižek have repeatedly drawn from medieval sources to theorize modernity. To forget the medieval, or to discount its continued effect on contemporary thought, is to neglect the responsibilities of periodization.

In The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, modernists and medievalists, as well as scholars specializing in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century comparative literature, offer a new history of theory and philosophy through essays on secularization and periodization, Marx’s (medieval) theory of commodity fetishism, Heidegger’s scholasticism, and Adorno’s nominalist aesthetics. One essay illustrates the workings of medieval mysticism in the writing of Freud’s most famous patient, Daniel Paul Schreber, author of Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903). Another looks at Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, a theoretical synthesis whose conscientious medievalism was the subject of much polemic in the post-9/11 era, a time in which premodernity itself was perceived as a threat to western values. The collection concludes with an afterword by Fredric Jameson, a theorist of postmodernism who has engaged with the medieval throughout his career.

Contributors: Charles D. Blanton, Andrew Cole, Kathleen Davis, Michael Hardt, Bruce Holsinger, Fredric Jameson, Ethan Knapp, Erin Labbie, Jed Rasula, D. Vance Smith, Michael Uebel

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Outside Modernity / Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith
Theological Modernities
- The Sense of an Epoch: Periodization, Sovereignty, and the Limits of Secularization / Kathleen Davis
- The Sacrament of the Fetish, the Miracle of the Commodity: Hegel and Marx / Andrew Cole
- Empire, Apocalypse, and the 9/11 Premodern / Bruce Holsinger
- Response: More Than We Bargained For / Michael Hardt
Scholastic Modernities
- We Have Never Been Schreber: Paranoia, Medieval and Modern / Erin Labbie and Michael Uebel
- Medieval Studies, Historicity, and Heidegger’s Early Phenomenology / Ethan Knapp
- Medieval Currencies: Nominalism and Art / C. D. Blanton
- Response: Medusa’s Gaze / Jed Rasula
Afterword: On the Medieval / Fredric Jameson
Bibliography
Contributors
Index