{"product_id":"critique-of-cynical-reason-1","title":"Critique of Cynical Reason","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 1983, two centuries after the publication of Kant's \u003ci\u003eCritique of Pure Reason\u003c\/i\u003e, another philosophical treatise-polemical in nature, with a title that conscious and disrespectfully alludes to the earlier work -appeared in West Germany. Pete Sloterdijk's \u003ci\u003eCritique of Cynical Reason\u003c\/i\u003e stirred both critical acclaim and consternation and attracted a wide readership, especially among those who had come of age in the 1960s. Sloterdijk finds cynicism the dominant mode in contemporary culture in personal and institutional settings; his book is less a history of the impulse than. an investigation of its role in the postmodern 1970s and 1980s, among those whose earlier hopes for social change had crumbled and faded away. Sloterdijk thus brings into cultural and political discourse an issue which, though central to the mood of a generation, has remained submerged throughout the current debate about modernity and postmodernity.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWith Adorno and Horkeimer's \u003ci\u003eDialectic of Enlightenment\u003c\/i\u003e as his primary jumping-off point, Sloterdijk also draws upon, and contends with, the poststructuralist concepts of Deleuze and Guattari. He defines cynicism as \u003ci\u003eenlightened false consciousness\u003c\/i\u003e-a sensibility \"well off and miserable at the same time,\" able to function in the workaday world yet assailed by doubt and paralysis; and, as counterstrategy, proposes the \u003ci\u003ekynicism\u003c\/i\u003e of antiquity-the sensuality and loud, satiric laughter of Diogenes. Above all, Sloterdijk is determined to resist the amnesia inherent in cynicism. The twentieth-century German historical experience lies behind his work, which closes with a brilliant essay on the Weimar Republic -the fourteen years between a lost war and Hitler's ascent to power, and a time when the cynical mode first achieved cultural dominance.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Minnesota Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54258152603992,"sku":"9780816615865","price":28.5,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/1295\/4195\/files\/9780816615865_5dfa8049-1a6a-4523-a20f-81cfd97f33c3.jpg?v=1777642227","url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/critique-of-cynical-reason-1","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}