Rust

Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, senior curator of Slought Foundation, one of the editors of the Journal of Modern Literature, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has authored or edited forty books and collections on modernism, psychoanalysis, philosophy and aesthetics.

Rabate counters our instinctively negative view of rust with a surprisingly wide variety of examples drawn from philosophy as well as the arts and sciences for a strikingly and broadly convincing argument as to the merits of rust … Rabate presents rust as an imperfection with unlimited possibilities. He clarifies its role in our lives and complicates how we value its role. He brings readers his family rouille recipe and the news that someday soon, science may give us a green rust capable of cleaning our water and soil … He provides plenty of food for thought as we run into these references across daily life.

• Introduction1. How to Live with Global Rust2. Hegel and Ruskin, from the Inorganic to the Organic3. Interlude: Blood-work4. Rats and Jackals, Kafka after von Hofmannsthal5. Aesthetics of RustConclusion: Fougères to Marseilles: Green Rust or Edible Rouille?AcknowledgmentsNotesIndex