Includes bibliographical references (pages 179-186) and index.
Think again: an introduction. -- 1. Death again: reimagining the end. -- The Humanities, the demography of aging, and the philosophy of birth -- The test and the copy of the Mad Men -- 2. Revisiting torture and torment. Spinoza's Post-Human Critique of Mimesis -- Nietzsche, Post-Humanism and back to the Biopolitical Economics of Mad Men -- 3. Revisiting clones: change and the politics of life. Cloning and art as mere copy of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go -- The market verifies the truth of life: Foucault's Biopolitics of Free Market Liberalism -- The Nazi Genocide, Hannah Arendt and the Philosophy of Birth -- 4. Rethinking suffering: self and substance. Literature's mediation between substantive and subjective suffering, or the Critique of Zizek: Can We Do Justice to Suffering Without a Notion of Substance? -- Aging, the changing demography, and literature's transformation of consciousness -- Literature's Critique of Fiction: Ishiguro's Remains of the Day -- 5. The birth of literature. From the market economy of the Romantic genius to art's disruption of the status quo -- A new cosmos of poetry-- Walter Benjamin's alternative to Martin Heidegger's and Paul de Man's approach to literature and its implications for cultural studies (Slavoj Zizek) -- Excursus: Agamben, Doctorow, and the Biopolitics of Representation -- Zizek, de Man, and Spinoza's Cartesian break with Descartes -- Hölderlin, Benjamin, and the poetry of new beginnings -- Celan, the void and the aftermath of the Nazi Genocide -- 6. The birth of politics. Benjamin's Poetics of Kantian Transcendental Philosophy -- Art's interconnected universe -- Heidegger or poetry as a function of history/politics and art as basis for politics in Benjamin -- 7. Rethinking birth and aging: a conclusion. The stereotype of the Jew as representation of aging and decay -- Philip Roth or revisiting Plato and Aristotle on Mimesis.
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"The capacity of the arts and the humanities, and of literature in particular, to have a meaningful societal impact has been increasingly undervalued in recent history. Both humanists and scientists have tended to think of the arts as a means to represent the world via imagination. Mack maintains that the arts do not merely describe our world but that they also have the unique and underappreciated power to make us aware of how we can change accustomed forms of perception and action"--Provided by publisher.