Critique of Bored Reason
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A01=Dmitri Nikulin
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Author_Dmitri Nikulin
Blaise Pascal
boredom
Category=QDTS
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
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Immanuel Kant
individuality
intellectual history
Martin Heidegger
modern subject
modernity
philosophy
postmodernism
Rene Descartes
Siegfried Kracauer
Soren Kirkegaard
Walter Benjamin
Product details
- ISBN 9780231189064
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 08 Feb 2022
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Most of the core concepts of the Western philosophical tradition originate in antiquity. Yet boredom is strikingly absent from classical thought. In this philosophical study, Dmitri Nikulin explores the concept’s genealogy to argue that boredom is the mark of modernity.
Nikulin contends that boredom is a specifically modern phenomenon. He provides a critical reconstruction of the concept of the modern subject as universal, rational, autonomous, and self-sufficient. Understanding itself in this way, this subject is at once the protagonist, playwright, director, and spectator of the staged drama of human existence. It is therefore inevitably monological, lonely, and alone, and can neither escape its own presence nor get rid of it. In other words, it is bored—and this boredom is the fundamental expression and symptom of the modern condition.
Considering such thinkers as Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Kierkegaard, Kracauer, Heidegger, and Benjamin, Critique of Bored Reason places boredom on center stage in the philosophical critique of modernity. Nikulin also considers the alternative to the notion of the autonomous subject in the—nonbored and nonboring—dialogic and comic subject capable of shared existence with others.
Nikulin contends that boredom is a specifically modern phenomenon. He provides a critical reconstruction of the concept of the modern subject as universal, rational, autonomous, and self-sufficient. Understanding itself in this way, this subject is at once the protagonist, playwright, director, and spectator of the staged drama of human existence. It is therefore inevitably monological, lonely, and alone, and can neither escape its own presence nor get rid of it. In other words, it is bored—and this boredom is the fundamental expression and symptom of the modern condition.
Considering such thinkers as Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Kierkegaard, Kracauer, Heidegger, and Benjamin, Critique of Bored Reason places boredom on center stage in the philosophical critique of modernity. Nikulin also considers the alternative to the notion of the autonomous subject in the—nonbored and nonboring—dialogic and comic subject capable of shared existence with others.
Dmitri Nikulin is professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of a number of books including Dialectic and Dialogue (2010), Comedy, Seriously (2014), The Concept of History (2017), and Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity (2019).
