Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Outside Modernity / Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith 1
Theological Modernities
The Sense of an Epoch: Periodization, Sovereignty, and the Limits of Secularization / Kathleen Davis 39
The Sacrament of the Fetish, the Miracle of the Commodity: Hegel and Marx / Andrew Cole 70
Empire, Apocalypse, and the 9/11 Premodern / Bruce Holsinger 94
Response: More Than We Bargained For / Michael Hardt 119
Scholastic Modernities
We Have Never Been Schreber: Paranoia, Medieval, and Modern / Erin Labbie and Michael Uebel 127
Medieval Studies, Historicity, and Heidegger's Early Phenomenology / Ethan Knapp 159
Medieval Currencies: Nominalism and Art / C. D. Blanton 194
Response: Medusa's Gaze / Jed Rasula 233
Afterword. On the Medieval / Fredric Jameson 243
Bibliography 247
Contributors 269
Index 271

Promotional Information

Offers an assessment of the place of the Middle Ages in critical theory.

About the Author

Andrew Cole is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer.

D. Vance Smith is Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary and The Book of the Incipit: Beginnings in the Fourteenth Century.

Reviews

"Even though key writers such as Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Proust have alerted us to the deep affinities between modernism and medievalism, we still tend to look down on the 'dark age' of scholasticism. By gathering theoreticians including Jameson, Hardt, Holsinger, and others, Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith argue for the relevance of medieval problematics for current philosophical conversations. Continuing Blumenberg's attack on the 'secularization' hypothesis, these exciting and challenging essays show that medieval ideas have exerted a huge influence on Freud, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Bourdieu, eiuek, and Negri, thus shaping our understanding of politics, aesthetics, literary criticism, and cultural critique. It is now evident that we all need a medieval basis to found modern Theory."oJean-Michel Rabate, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania "These exciting and challenging essays show that medieval ideas have exerted a huge influence on Freud, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Bourdieu, eiuek, and Negri, thus shaping our understanding of politics, aesthetics, literary criticism, and cultural critique. It is now evident that we all need a medieval basis to found modern Theory."oJean-Michel Rabate, author of The Ethics of the Lie "An uncompromising riposte to the notion, in Medieval Studies as elsewhere, that critique is dead and that we should quietly return to tasks of description. A potent demonstration that without critical theory, modernity and the medieval are unintelligible."oDavid Wallace, author of Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn