Language, discourse, society

"Taking Emerson as his starting point, Cornel West's basic task in this ambitious enterprise is to chart the emergence, development, decline, and recent resurgence of American pragmatism. John Dewey is the central figure in West's pantheon of pragmatists, but he treats as well such varied mid-century representatives of the tradition as Sidney Hook, C. Wright Mills, W.E.B. Du Bois, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Lionel Trilling. West's "genealogy" is, ultimately, a very personal work, for it is imbued throughout with the author's conviction that a thorough reexamination of American pragmatism may help inspire and instruct contemporary efforts to remake and reform American society and culture."--Publisher description.

For twenty-five years, the Language, Discourse, Society series has been at the forefront of multidisciplinary studies, publishing books on topics ranging from biology to aesthetics, sociology to literary criticism, philosophy to art history. The Language, Discourse, Society Reader offers a representative selection of material from those books to give a valuable overview of the work of the series. That work has been concerned both with formal analysis and historical explanation, with both social theory and the study of language, and concerned with showing the necessary interrelations of the separate disciplines for the understanding of the complex reality of different objects of study. The title of the series was, and is, the recognition of this: language, discourse and society are to be grasped together in an interdependence and interaction within which they are neither to be held separate nor run into one another regardless of their specificity. The founding ambition of the series, as the Editors make clear and examine in their introduction to the Reader, was to argue for and develop such an approach. It is that argument and that development which this Reader sets out and exemplifies.

When Freud revised his view of the drives, he was living under the shadow of death and the threat of biological and cultural genocide. Like the early twentieth century, our times are marked by massive geopolitical trauma and shifts in technological, epistemic and sexual-representational practices. This book argues for the renewed relevance of the Freudian theory of drives through a variety of works ranging from cinema and literature to metapsychology and cultural theory. After presenting Freud's successive configurations of the drive in the form of a guide, 'illustrated' with reference to popular films, Teresa de Lauretis discusses two instances of philosophical-political contestation: Foucault's critique of Freud's 'stubborn drive', which served as foundation for the notion of social construction, and Laplanche's critique of Freud's biologism. The last two chapters trace the figural inscription of the death drive through close readings of Djuna Barnes's high-modernist novel Nightwood (1936) and David Cronenberg's postmodern film eXistenZ (1999).