The Task of Cultural CritiqueIn this study, Teresa L. Ebert makes a spirited, pioneering case for a new cultural critique committed to the struggles for human freedom and global equality. Demonstrating the implosion of the linguistic turn that isolates culture from historical processes, The Task of Cultural Critique maps the contours of an emerging materialist critique that contributes toward a critical social and cultural consciousness. Through groundbreaking analyses of cultural texts, Ebert questions the contemporary Derridian dogma that asserts "the future belongs to ghosts." Events-to-come are not spectral, she contends, but the material outcome of global class struggles. Not "hauntology" but history produces cultural practices and their conflictive representations--from sexuality, war, and consumption to democracy, torture, globalization, and absolute otherness. With close readings of texts from Proust and Balzac to "Chick Lit," from Lukács, de Man, Deleuze, and Marx to Derrida, Žižek, Butler, Kollontai, and Agamben, the book opens up new directions for cultural critique today. |
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abstract alienation Allegories ameson Anti-Oedipus argues become binary body without organs bourgeois capitalism capitalist chick lit class relations class struggle commodity concepts concrete conflicts consciousness consumption contemporary critique contemporary cultural critique contradictions corporeal critical cynical deconstruction Deleuze and Guattari deployed Derrida dialectical différance difference discourse economic effect epistemology erotic everyday exploitation fantasy feminism feminist feminist pedagogy field figure find first fissures flows freedom gender globalization Grosz heroine historical ideology interpretation knowledge Kollontai kynical labor power language linguistic logic ludic Man’s Marxism material means metaphysics metonymy mimesis narrative needs objective Parallax View pedagogy of desire pleasure political Postmodernism practices profit reading realism reality relations of production representation represented Resistance to Theory rhetoric romance novels sexual signifier singular social relations social totality society specific structure textual Thousand Plateaus tion transformative tropes tropological truth University Press wage labor women words workers York Zizek