Scott Cutler Shershow – författare

The right-to-die debate has gone on for centuries, playing out most recently as a spectacle of protest surrounding figures such as Terry Schiavo. In Deconstructing Dignity, Scott Cutler Shershow offers a powerful new way of thinking about it philosophically. Focusing on the concepts of human dignity and the sanctity of life, he employs Derridean deconstruction to uncover self-contradictory and damaging assumptions that underlie both sides of the debate. Shershow examines texts from Cicero's De Officiis to Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to court decisions and religious declarations. Through them he reveals how arguments both supporting and denying the right to die undermine their own unconditional concepts of human dignity and the sanctity of life with a hidden conditional logic, one often tied to practical economic concerns and the scarcity or unequal distribution of medical resources. He goes on to examine the exceptional case of self-sacrifice, closing with a vision of a society - one whose conditions we are far from meeting-in which the debate can finally be resolved.A sophisticated analysis of a heated topic, Deconstructing Dignity is also a masterful example of deconstructionist methods at work.

The Work and the Gift considers how working and giving are taken for opposites and revealed as each other's ghostly shadow. We ask ourselves, for instance, to work for a wage and a living, dooming ourselves forever to the curse of daily toil; and yet we imagine the magnum opus or the oeuvre as a labor of love. We ask ourselves to give with no thought of return; yet we still tell ourselves to give only to the deserving and only where our giving will do some good. Ranging from Marx and Derrida to Friedrich Hayek and Alvin Toffler, Scott Cutler Shershow here explores the predictions of political thinkers on both the left and the right that work is fundamentally changing, or even disappearing; the debates among anthropologists and historians about an archaic gift-economy that preceded capitalism and might reemerge in its wake; contemporary political battles over charity and social welfare; and attempts by modern and postmodern artists to destabilize the work of art as we know it.Ultimately, Shershow joins other contemporary thinkers in envisioning a community of unworking, grounded neither in ideals of production and progress, nor in an ethic of liberal generosity, but simply in our fundamental being-in-common. What results is a brilliant intervention in critical theory and social thought that will be of enormous value to students of literary criticism, anthropology, and philosophy alike.

Marxist Shakespeares uses the rich analytic resources of the Marxist tradition to look at Shakespeare's plays afresh. The book offers new insights into the historical conditions within which Shakespeare's representations of class and gender emerged, and into Shakespeare's role in the global culture industry stretching from Hollywood to the Globe Theatre. A vital resource for students of Shakespeare which includes Marx's own readings of Shakespeare, Derrida on Marx, and also Bourdieu, Bataillle, Negri and Alice Clark.

Marxist Shakespeares uses the rich analytic resources of the Marxist tradition to look at Shakespeare's plays afresh. The book offers new insights into the historical conditions within which Shakespeare's representations of class and gender emerged, and into Shakespeare's role in the global culture industry stretching from Hollywood to the Globe Theatre. A vital resource for students of Shakespeare which includes Marx's own readings of Shakespeare, Derrida on Marx, and also Bourdieu, Bataillle, Negri and Alice Clark.

Explores issues related to race and religion in Lovecraft criticism.Today, H. P. Lovecraft is both more popular and controversial than ever: the influence of his "Cthulhu mythos" is everywhere in popular culture, his cosmic pessimism has reemerged as a major theme in contemporary philosophy, and his racism continues to spark controversy in the media. The Love of Ruins takes a fresh look at a figure widely acknowledged as the father of modern horror or "weird" fiction. In these pages, Lovecraft emerges not as the atheist and nihilist he is often claimed to be, but as a kind of "psychonaut" and mystic whose stories, through their own imaginative rigor, expose the intellectual bankruptcy of their author's racism. The Love of Ruins is itself written in the form of letters, in order to do homage to Lovecraft's love of the form of the personal letter (he wrote more than 100,000), and to emulate Lovecraft's lifetime practice of thinking-as-corresponding.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Bread is an object that is always in process of becoming something else: flower to grain, grain to dough, dough to loaf, loaf to crumb. Bread is also often a figure or vehicle of social cohesion: from the homely image of “breaking bread together” to the mysteries of the Eucharist. But bread also commonly figures in social conflict — sometimes literally, in the “bread riots” that punctuate European history, and sometimes figuratively, in the ways bread operates as ethnic, religious or class signifier. Drawing on a wide range of sources, from the scriptures to modern pop culture, Bread tells the story of how this ancient and everyday object serves as a symbol for both social communion and social exclusion.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

The Work and the Gift considers how working and giving are taken for opposites and revealed as each other's ghostly shadow. We ask ourselves, for instance, to work for a wage and a living, dooming ourselves forever to the curse of daily toil; and yet we imagine the magnum opus or the oeuvre as a labor of love. We ask ourselves to give with no thought of return; yet we still tell ourselves to give only to the deserving and only where our giving will do some good. Ranging from Marx and Derrida to Friedrich Hayek and Alvin Toffler, Scott Cutler Shershow here explores the predictions of political thinkers on both the left and the right that work is fundamentally changing, or even disappearing; the debates among anthropologists and historians about an archaic gift-economy that preceded capitalism and might reemerge in its wake; contemporary political battles over charity and social welfare; and attempts by modern and postmodern artists to destabilize the work of art as we know it.Ultimately, Shershow joins other contemporary thinkers in envisioning a community of unworking, grounded neither in ideals of production and progress, nor in an ethic of liberal generosity, but simply in our fundamental being-in-common. What results is a brilliant intervention in critical theory and social thought that will be of enormous value to students of literary criticism, anthropology, and philosophy alike.