The Haunted Present - by Wolfram Eilenberger (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A wildly original narrative of philosophy in crisis, The Haunted Present traces the dreams and struggles of Theodor Adorno, Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, and Paul K. Feyerabend, to reveal the true fault lines of our world today

It is the winter 1949: Theodor W. Adorno returns from the USA to Frankfurt, a city devastated by bombing; Paul K. Feyerabend arrives back in Vienna, disabled and suffering from chronic pain, having been shot in the final months of the war; the child prodigy Susan Sontag visits Thomas Mann in Los Angeles; and, a young Michel Foucault attempts suicide, again, in Paris. The aftermath of the Second World War calls for the world to be remade, and this quartet of wildly independent and original thinkers are seeking ways into a new philosophy. Over the coming decades, they will revolutionize how we think about society, culture, and science.

Eilenberger presents readers once again with a tour de force that, through the example of four courageous minds, testifies to the power of philosophy to escape the constraints of the present. Critical theory, aesthetic rebellion, scientific skepticism, and political disillusionment collided violently in the wake of the war to shape our fractious, hyper-mediated reality today. Have the ideals of the Enlightenment been lost forever? Do science, art, and democracy still hold any promise? Or, has the time come to say goodbye to the very idea of humanity?

Shifting and jumping mercurially from Frankfurt to Paris, London to Berkeley and New York to take in a kaleidoscopic world seething with change, Eilenberger's daring narrative unmasks the competing intellectual impulses that emerged to produce our era of crisis.

About the Author

Wolfram Eilenberger is an internationally bestselling author and philosopher. He is the founding editor of Philosophie Magazin and hosts the television program Sternstunde Philosophie on the Swiss public television network SRF. In 2018, he published Time of the Magicians in Germany. The book instantly became a bestseller there, as well as in Italy and Spain, and won the prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France. It has been translated into more than twenty languages. Eilenberger has been a prolific contributor of essays and articles to many publications, among them Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, and Cicero, and has taught at the University of Toronto, Indiana University Bloomington, and Berlin University of the Arts.