Disastrous Subjectivities

Download or read book Disastrous Subjectivities written by David Collings and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In sharply original readings of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Disastrous Subjectivities explores modernity’s failed promise to bring about a just social order under the ongoing threat of climate change. Drawing on Kantian critical philosophy and Lacanian theory, this book traverses aspects of the history of science, the form of the novel, the limits of historicism, and the impasses of moral autonomy. What passes for modernity takes shape not as truly modern or secular, but instead as a mode perpetually haunted by a traumatic sublime. The demand to realize justice within history turns out to require more than history can make possible, and more than the subject can bear.