Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory

GENE RAY has taught at New College of Florida, USA and the University of Hawaii at Manoa and is a former German Chancellor's Scholar of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, USA.

"This book sees, without sentiment, into the dark heart of our world; war is the health of the state, and nuclear exterminism the perfection of its logic. Ray not only explores, with fierce lucidity, this terrible truth and the ways in which it implicates the human psyche and imagination, but prepares the critical ground for the gathering of counter-powers to capitalist modernity and the spectacle. An artful, profound work of radical aesthetics." - Iain A. Boal, University of California, Berkeley "Ray's book demonstrates a continuing commitment to cultural critique that extends and exceeds its formulation in the Frankfurt School, most especially in the writings of Adorno. Taken together, his collected essays constitute a penetrating witness to late twentieth-century cultural history. There are, to my knowledge, simply no books out there that provide a similarly penetrating and wide-ranging account, with such a clear critical trajectory." - Barbara McCloskey, University of Pittsburgh "Many contemporary theorists have recently turned their attention to the relation between art and politics. In this area, however, Ray's work is unique: philosophically informed as well as imaginative, analytically forceful and yet poetic, it highlights the task of productive mourning necessary for a post-fantasmatic reorientation of critical theory and radical politics." - Yannis Stavrakakis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

• Introduction: The Hit Reading the Lisbon Earthquake: Adorno, Lyotard, and the Contemporary Sublime Joseph Beuys and the 'After-Auschwitz' Sublime Ground Zero: Hiroshima Haunts 9/11 Mirroring Evil: Auschwitz, Art, and the 'War on Terror' Little Glass House of Horror: Taking Damien Hirst Seriously Blasted Moments: Remarking a Hiroshima Image Installing a 'New Cosmopolitics': Derrida and the Writers The Trauerspiel in the Age of Its Global Reproducibility: Boaz Arad's Hitler Videos Listening with the Third Ear: Echoes From Ground Zero Conditioning Adorno: 'After Auschwitz' Now