On Paradox

Elizabeth S. Anker is Professor of Law and Associate Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University, coeditor of Critique and Postcritique, also published by Duke University Press, and author of Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature.

“The novelty of [Anker’s] approach is to identify theory’s style of thought with a fatal attraction to paradox, to something that appears absurd or contradictory but is actually true. . . . Anker illuminates both why theory has migrated so effectively beyond the academy and also how its self-replicating endlessness gives a startling large-scale intellectual uniformity to the pronouncements of elite institutions and right-wing conspiracists alike.” - Michael W. Clune (Los Angeles Review of Books) "As an intellectual and institutional history of critique, On Paradox offers a compelling explanation for the contemporary malaise of theory and critique." - J Daniel Elam (Law & Literature) "What happens when you try to critique a paradox by using a paradox? This is the mesmerizingly encyclopedic project of Elizabeth Anker’s On Paradox. Reading her book is like entering a haunted hall of mirrors: You get sudden insights down infinite hallways, deep into some tangle of theology, aesthetics, and politics-you run after them, and then you turn around to find them right behind you. Paradoxes are weirdly charismatic and slippery in this book." - Eleanor Courtemanche (Public Books)

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction: On Paradox  11. All That Is Solid Melts into Paradox: The Idea of Modernity  292. Ontologizing the Paradoxes of Rights, or the Anti-legalism of Theory  73Interlude. Anatomy of Paradox, or a Brief History of Aesthetic Theory  1123. Redeeming Rights, or the Ethics and Politics of Paradox  1384. The Politics of Exclusion  1815. The Pedagogy of Paradox  221Interlude. A Different Kind of Theory  2616. What Holds Things Together: Toward an Integrative Criticism  266Notes  313Bibliography  335Index