“Simon Morgan Wortham’s Modern Thought in Pain is ambitious in scope, compellingly presented and timely. The book’s daring central premise is that pain is not merely an object for thought, but is implicated in the very act of thinking. The book forges a new way of understanding how modern ethics, psychoanalysis and aesthetics arise and are bound together through the questions posed by pain.”

Elissa Marder, Professor of French & Comparative Literature, Emory University

 

Through a series of rigorous encounters with key critical figures, this book argues that modern thought is, in a double sense, the thought of pain. It investigates the idea that modern European philosophy after Kant offers less the conceptual equipment to tackle pain in explanatory terms, than an experience of thought that participates in the forms of pain and suffering about which it speaks. Perhaps surprisingly, the question of pain establishes a ground from which to examine key debates in twentieth-century European philosophy, most recently between forms of post-structuralist and ethical thinking imagined to be in crisis and the resurgence of discourses of political emancipation arising from traditions of thought associated with Marxism.

Key features:

• Offers a systematic account of the modern European tradition’s relationship to the question of pain and suffering
• Suggests new readings of ‘ethics’ and ‘evil’
• Evaluates the politics of contemporary critical theory
• Sets new agendas for reading post-Kantian philosophy

Order at http://www.euppublishing.com/book/9780748692415