Dr Ian Cooper, within the Department of German, has just published his co-edited collection Dialectic and Paradox: Configurations of the Third in Modernity (Peter Lang, 2013).
The book appears as Volume 19 in the series Cultural History and Literary Imagination.
The collection explores the volatile power of ‘third agency’. Systems of thought and practice are often disturbed by the presence of a figure that exceeds traditional binary oppositions.
The articles in the book trace the role of these triadic figures across a broad range of discourses in social theory, philosophy and science studies. Modernity emerges as a mode of system-formation, perpetuation and self-reflection that is deeply rooted in the dynamics of dialectic and paradox.
The book offers an approach which is both systematic and genealogical, providing innovative perspectives on such major thinkers as Adorno, Agamben, Derrida, C. S. Peirce, the Romantics and Simmel as well as phenomena like the psychology of jealousy and envy, the epistemic status of scientific images and conceptions of metabolism. It is the first attempt to look at configurations of the third as a paradigm for the ‘unfinished project of modernity’ (Habermas).
For more details, please see the publisher’s website here: