Philosophies of Defeat The Jargon of Finitude

How radical thought has internalized the experience of defeat

A rising star of contemporary critical theory offers an expansive critique on a prominent tradition of thought, 'the jargon of finitude.' Associated with Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, over the past few decades this tradition has been able to bolster its credentials as an indispensable contribution in the rethinking of the Left. However, rather than constituting a radical leftist opening in contemporary political thought, these are in many ways philosophies of defeat. Bosteels exmines the paradoxes inherent in materialist thinking and argues against time as the primordial mode of access to a thinking of finitude that today has become the dominant form of a new idealism, parading in the guise of a radical, post-metaphysical, anti-dialectical and hyper-ethical form of materialism.

BRUNO BOSTEELS is the author of The Actuality of Communism and Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Religion and Psychoanalysis in Times of Terror, also from Verso. He teaches at Cornell University.