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A Time for the Humanities

Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy
Edited by James J. Bono, Tim Dean, and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

This book brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines including philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the conceptual foundations of the humanities and the question of their future. What notions of the future, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties about the humanities in our current geopolitical situation? How can we think about the unpredictable and unthought dimensions of praxis implicit in the very notion of futurity?

The essays here argue that the uncertainty of the future represents both an opportunity for critical engagement and a matrix for invention. Broadly conceived, the notion of invention, or cultural poiesis, questions the key assumptions and tasks of a whole range of practices in the humanities, beginning with critique, artistic practices, and intellectual inquiry, and ending with technology, emancipatory politics, and ethics. The essays discuss a wide range of key figures (e.g., Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray), problems (e.g., becoming, kinship and the foreign, "disposable populations" within a global political economy, queerness and the death drive, the parapoetic, electronic textuality, invention and accountability, political and social reform in Latin America), disciplines and methodologies (philosophy, art and art history, visuality, political theory, criticism and critique, psychoanalysis, gender analysis, architecture, literature, art).

The volume should be required reading for all who feel a deep commitment to the humanities, its practices, and its future. 

250 pages
978-0-8232-2919-2, Cloth
978-0-8232-2920-8, Paper


"Opens a battlefront and conversation that is likely to preoccupy the next generation."
—Tom Cohen, University at Albany

James J. Bono is Associate Professor of History and of Medicine at the University at Buffalo. A past president of the Society for Literature and Science and founding editor of the journal Configurations, he is the author of The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine, vol. 1, Ficino to Descartes, and co-editor of Ethical Issues in Health Care on the Frontiers of the Twenty-First Century.

Tim Dean is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Humanities Institute at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of Beyond Sexuality and the editor of Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis. His most recent book is Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking.

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature and Founding Director of the Humanities Institute at the University at Buffalo. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism and An Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity, and the Politics of Radical Democracy; the editor of Gombrowicz's Grimaces: Modernism, Gender, Nationality; and the co-editor of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva's Polis and Intermedialities: Philosophy, Art, Politics.