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Modern Thought in Pain: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis

Online ISBN:
9781474408660
Print ISBN:
9780748692415
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press
Book

Modern Thought in Pain: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis

Simon Morgan Wortham
Simon Morgan Wortham
Kingston University
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Published online:
17 September 2015
Published in print:
1 December 2014
Online ISBN:
9781474408660
Print ISBN:
9780748692415
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press

Abstract

This book analyses how modern conceptions of politics, ethics, and critical thought can be re-evaluated through the question of pain. Using a series of rigorous encounters with key critical figures, it argues that modern thought is, in more than one sense, the ‘thought of pain’. It investigates the idea that modern European philosophy after Kant is less about offering the conceptual equipment to tackle pain in explanatory terms, and more about the experience of thought that accompanies the forms of pain and suffering about which it speaks. The book also argues that the question of pain establishes a vantage point from which it is possible to examine key debates in twentieth-century European philosophy. These debates include recent discussions about forms of post-structuralist and ethical thinking and the resurgence of political discourses associated with Marxism. Overall, it offers a systematic account of the modern European tradition's relationship to the question of pain and suffering, suggests new readings of ‘ethics’ and ‘evil’, evaluates the politics of contemporary critical theory, and sets new agendas for reading post-Kantian philosophy.

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