Experimenting - by Simon Morgan Wortham & Gary Hall (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The work of Samuel Weber has greatly influenced writers and thinkers across the arts and humanities: including literary, critical, and cultural theory; media, communication, theater, and cultural studies; new media and technology; psychoanalysis; and philosophy. His remarkable and inaugural texts have been especially important to the deconstructive tradition, given his early recognition of the importance of the writings of Jacques Derrida. Taught by Theodor W. Adorno and Peter Szondi, he is equally at home in the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, in the German literary tradition, or in psychoanalysis.

Weber played an important role in the process of translation, publication, and interpretation that brought "theory" to prominence in the United States. His work continues to reactivate and transform the legacy bequeathed to us by figures such as Kant, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger, de Man, and Derrida, not least by exposing the field of philosophy to contemporary questions in the arenas of media, technology, politics, and culture.

This volume brings together a number of eminent scholars seeking to assess the intellectual impact of Weber's large body of writings. It also contains two new and previously unpublished essays by Weber himself: "'God Bless America!'" and "'Going Along for the Ride: Violence and Gesture-Agamben Reading Benjamin Reading Kafka Reading Cervantes.'"

Review Quotes

At a time when many have sought to don the mantle of a "public intellectual", Sam Weber has been developing a rigorous analysis of
the very possibility of a public sphere today and of its conditions of existence. The essays in this collection attest to the significance of this undertaking and build upon it. No discussion of the role and place of intellectuals today can afford to ignore them.

-----Wlad Godzich, University of California, Santa Cruz

A solid book that offers an unprecedented evaluation and presentation of Weber's work. A landmark volume.-----Patricia Dailey, Columbia University

An excellent job of presenting the incredible range of Weber's thought.-----Emily Apter, New York University

An indispensable volume. Though still insufficiently recognized, Samuel Weber has been for some decades one of the most acute, inspiring and important thinkers in literary and cultural theory.-----Nicholas Royle, University of Sussex

Experimenting is a wonderful collection of essays about Samuel Weber's work. Weber is one of our most important critics. As the two new essays by him included in this volume show, he combines in a quite extraordinary way strikingly original insights into literature, philosophy, critical theory, global culture, technics, and the new media. These distinguished essays about Weber do justice to Samuel Weber's breadth, originality, and indispensable importance in present-day intellectual life. The essays tend to focus on the role of technicity in Weber's work, as he relates it to the aesthetic, to interpretation, and to institutions. Each essay, however, is in its own way admirably true to Weber's remarkable gift for transforming the authors he discusses by going beyond them "experimentally."-----J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine

About the Author

Simon Morgan Wortham is Professor of English at the University of Portsmouth. His books include Counter-institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University (Fordham).

Gary Hall is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Middlesex University.