Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Dis-Orientations: Philosophy, Literature and the Lost Grounds of Modernity

This highly original collection of essays contributes to a critique of the common understanding of modernity as an enlightened project that provides rational grounds for orientation in all aspects and dimensions of the world. An international team of contributors contend that the modern principles of foundation show in themselves rather how modernity is disorienting itself. The book brings together discussions on the writings of philosophers who treat more systematically the questions of foundation and orientation, such as Kant, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Pascal, and Patočka, and studies of literary works that explicitly thematize this question, such as Novalis, Hölderlin, Beckett, Platonov, and Benjamin. This multi-disciplinary approach brings to the fore the paradox that modern figures of grounding and orientation unground and disorient and demonstrates a critical path to review current understandings of modernity and post-modernity. Review A provocative collection of essays exploring "disorientation" as the moving force of the present. Reflecting on disorientation in thought, in existence, in being, and in language, these essays examine the theoretical challenges of thinking our present situation of suspension, hovering, homelessness, and exile that have emerged from the lost grounds of modernity.--Peg Birmingham, Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University A thought-provoking and compelling inquiry into the predicaments of our times, Dis-orientations challenges us to see a gain rather than a loss in the modern 'loss of grounds'--Jayne Svenungsson, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Stockholm School of Theology This is a carefully put together and astonishingly coherent collection of insightful philosophical reflections on how major Modern thinkers and writers oriented themselves in a thoroughly disoriented world, where all metaphysical grounding had lost its footing and nothing could have been taken for granted. A vast and illuminating scope of essays, ranging from Novalis to Kundera, from Heidegger to Platonov, from Kierkegaard to Benjamin, this volume is an invaluable contribution to understanding Modernity at its existential best.--Michal Pawel Markowski, Professor at University of Illinois About the Author Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback is Professor of Philosophy at Sodertorn University, Sweden. She has published widely in both English and Portuguese, including the Portuguese translation of Heidegger's Being and Time. Tora Lane ph. D is a Project Researcher at CBEES, Sodertorn University, Sweden.