Power of the Impossible, The

Erik S. Roraback was born in Seattle, USA, and teaches U.S. literature, cultural-studies, critical theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis in Charles University, and international cinema in Prague's film academy, F.A.M.U. He has lectured in fifteen countries and published more than thirty-five conference papers. He lives in Prague, Czech Republic.

Learned, exigent, original, and timely, Erik Roraback's The Power of the Impossible: On Community and the Creative Life presents authoritative readings of what important theorists from Spinoza to Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy, Zizek, and others have had to say about community and the individual, with sections along the way on how those theorists might lead us to approach work by Henry James, James Joyce, Ralph Ellison, Dante Alighieri, and, surprisingly, the great tennis player, Ivan Lendl. Roraback also develops on the basis of his theorists his own persuasive concept of an impossible/possible global community yet to come that would facilitate individual creativity as well as contest the repressive hegemony of finance capitalism and technology, especially digital technology. - J. Hillis Miller, The University of California at Irvine