requiem for certainty

My latest book now exists… as a book…

with 4 comments

I received copies of my Genealogy as Critique this week.  It is a real little object.  That makes me happy.  So I posed for a picture of myself holding it.  Then I went out with a few friends to celebrate its publication.  Through it all I even donned a bowtie to punctuate the occasion with what I hope was an unassuming bit of flair.

The publisher did a  handsome job with ck + gcthe typography and cover, or at least I think so.  Indeed, I’m very happy with the cover design and image (and yes, I chose the image, it’s a Duchamp, surprise surprise, and you can read about it in the book).

Here is a description from the back cover (cobbled together, of course, somewhere between me and the publishers): “Viewing Foucault in the light of work by Continental and American philosophers, most notably Nietzsche, Habermas, Deleuze, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and Ian Hacking, Genealogy as Critique shows that philosophical genealogy involves not only the critique of modernity but also its transformation. Colin Koopman engages genealogy as a philosophical tradition and a method for understanding the complex histories of our present social and cultural conditions. He explains how our understanding of Foucault can benefit from productive dialogue with philosophical allies to push Foucaultian genealogy a step further and elaborate a means of addressing our most intractable contemporary problems.”

If you like, you can read more about the book on Indiana University Press’s website (http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?cPath=1037_1112&products_id=806494) and, one hopes, in book reviews in your favorite journals soon.  If you are coming to APA Pacific then there will be a little author-critics session on this book plus the Pragmatism one, if you feel like coming out in support.

I could say much much muchly more but I guess that’s why I wrote the thing.  Hopefully I say it all there.

And so on to the next one.

Written by Colin Koopman

February 3, 2013 at 3:40 am

4 Responses

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  1. Congrats on the new book, Colin! I’ve just ordered my own (nicely priced, paperback) copy from amazon. Looking forward to its arrival, and to witnessing your rare “syncretist” gifts in action.

    David Rondel

    February 5, 2013 at 1:53 pm

  2. congrats, looking forward to reading it and hope that the book is well met in its reception, we need more activity along these lines of thought.

    dmfant

    February 5, 2013 at 6:26 pm

  3. Here is another ‘back-cover-style’ description I wrote that is perhaps a little more jargony and so perhaps offers a slightly more technical perspective on what is going on in the book…

    Negotiating the work of critique across a plurality of philosophical traditions, the book explicates genealogy as a historical-philosophical methodology capable of furthering the work of critical inquiries into emergent scenes of modern and contemporary life. Central ideas from the work of Michel Foucault (such as problematization, power, punishment and parrhesia, just to name the Ps) are developed through intersections with Jürgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Gilles Deleuze, Bernard Williams, Ian Hacking, William James, John Dewey, and others.

    colin

    February 5, 2013 at 7:13 pm

  4. […] Publication date: 2/25/2013 Format: paper 362 pages ISBN: 978-0-253-00621-9 Publisher’s page Author’s blog […]


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