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Overview
During recent years critics have increasingly expressed their loss of faith in existing cultural and political collective frameworks, drawing attention instead to irreducible singularity and to radical incommensurability between diverse positions or groups. Hiddleston analyses and challenges this trend, bringing together political, theoretical and literary analysis and juxtaposing the works of critical theorists such as Derrida, Lyotard and Nancy with literature by writers of North African immigrant origin. She presents a critique of those writers who underline the absence of communal identification, proposes a new emphasis on relational networks interconnecting diverse cultural groups, and argues for a more subtle understanding of the complex interplay of the singular and the collective in contemporary French writing.Synopsis
Nancy, Derrida, Lyotard, Blanchot, and Badiou are among the French thinkers who proclaimed the death of community in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hiddleston (French studies, U. of Warwick) examines sections from the works of such writers in order to identify the relationship between their thinking and contemporary socio-political debates in France. She does not attempt a full analysis of their philosophical trajectory, she explains, but explores the contemporary skepticism towards the unifying power of community across a variety of genres. Distributed in the US by the David Brown Book Company. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR