Contaminations : : Beyond Dialectics in Modern Literature, Science and Film / / Michael Mack.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Edinburgh University Press Complete eBook-Package 2016
• VerfasserIn: Mack, Michael,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2022]; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (240 p.)

Introduces the figure of contamination as alternative to dialecticsListen to a podcast on Contaminations by the author.This book enquires into the problem of various oppositions between pure entities such as nature and society, body and mind, science and the arts, subjectivity and objectivity. It examines how works of literature and cinema have contaminated constructions of the pure and the immune with their purported opposite. As an advanced critical introduction to the figure of contamination, the book makes explicit what so far has remained unarticulated − what has only been implied − within postmodern, poststructuralist and deconstructive theory.Combining theory with literary criticism, the book sheds light on how overlooked aspects of 'the novels of Henry James, Herman Melville and H. G. Wells question notions of natural order as well as an opposition between the subjective and the objective. It offers fresh readings of classic films and literary texts, including Vertigo and Moby Dick, with the aim to ground theoretical insights in close analysis.Key FeaturesCritically engages with some aspects of contemporary theory that keep propounding a Cartesian notion of the mind's control over the bodyAnalyses how key thinkers such as Spinoza, Benjamin, Pasolini and Freud attempt to re-evaluate what Agamben calls 'bare life'Offers original readings of Pasolini's notion of scandalo in terms of contaminationAlerts us to the ways in which some aspects of contemporary posthumanism may merely reproduce the dialects of inclusion and exclusion which is still premised on traditional notions of purity and immunity"

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Climate Change and the Contamination of the Anthropocene -- 1 Contaminating Psychology with Biology: Descartes, Spinoza, Freud and Žižek -- 2 Contaminating the Visible with the Invisible: From Einstein via H. G. Wells to Hannah Arendt, Luhmann and Derrida -- 3 Contamination of Nature with Society: The Collapse of Natural Order from Melville to Wells and Ellison -- 4 Contaminating Judgement with its Suspension: Guilt and Punishment in Walter Benjamin, Herman Melville and Henry James -- 5 Contaminating the Digital: Action and Perception in Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock -- 6 Contaminating the Sacred with the Profane: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Biopolitics -- 7 Contaminating Posthumanism -- Bibliography -- Index