The Fall Out of Redemption

Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy

Professor Joseph Acquisto (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

232 Seiten

2016
Bloomsbury Academic (Verlag)
978-1-5013-2645-5 (ISBN)

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Joseph Acquisto examines literary writers and critical theorists who employ theological frameworks, but who divorce that framework from questions of belief and thereby remove the doctrine of salvation from their considerations. Acquisto claims that Baudelaire inaugurates a new kind of amodern modernity by canceling the notion of salvation in his writing while also refusing to embrace any of its secular equivalents, such as historical progress or redemption through art.

Through a series of “interhistorical” readings that put literary and critical writers from the last 150 years in dialogue, Acquisto shows how these authors struggle to articulate both the metaphysical and esthetic consequences of attempting to move beyond a logic of salvation. Putting these writers into dialogue with Baudelaire highlights the way both literary and critical approaches attempt to articulate a third option between theism and atheism that also steers clear of political utopianism and Nietzschean estheticism. In the concluding section, Acquisto expands metaphysical and esthetic concerns to account also for the ethics inherent in the refusal of the logic of salvation, an ethics which emerges from, rather than seeking to redeem or cancel, a certain kind of nihilism.

Joseph Acquisto is Professor of French at the University of Vermont, USA. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Reading Baudelaire with Adorno: Subjectivity, Dissonance, Transcendence (Bloomsbury, 2023), Poetry's Knowing Ignorance (Bloomsbury, 2019), Proust, Music, and Meaning: Theories and Practices of Listening in the Recherche (2017), and Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French Literature (2012).

Introduction
1. Saving Nothing: Baudelaire, Benjamin, de Man, Agamben
2. Veil over the Abyss: From Walter Benjamin to Benjamin Fondane
3. Coming to an End: Agamben and Baudelaire
4. The Order of Impossible Salvation: From Baudelaire to Cioran
5. The Eternal Fall: Cioran
6. Asoteriological Ethics: Baudelaire, Audi, Nancy
Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	17.11.2016
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	318 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Metaphysik / Ontologie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-5013-2645-7 / 1501326457
ISBN-13	978-1-5013-2645-5 / 9781501326455
Zustand	Neuware