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9781509560264

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"""In her vivid, inimitable style, melding the colloquial with the abstract, the German with the American, Avital Ronell explores both America as a test site for philosophy and the status of the idea of America -- in Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Freud, and Cavell -- in reflections that put pressure on the fate of philosophy today."" Jonathan Culler, Cornell University ""MAGA (“make America great again”) is not just a formula invented by recent Rightist populists – Trump and his allies brought out what was lurking in the background all the time: the nasty aggressive aspect of American identity. This dark aspect was described in hundreds of books and articles, but Avital Ronell’s new book does something unique: it analyzes “America” as a philosopheme, as a complex network of philosophical presuppositions. So we will look in vain for the usual suspects in her book: no well-known racist nationalists and imperialists but big critical names from Emerson to Cavell, from Freud to Derrida, who all detected something amiss in American identity. The magic of the book is in how it combines the highest subtle theoretical debates with perspicuous observations about daily life, like the oversized trucks transporting homes which indicate a profoundly American notion of permanent displacement. In short, Ronell does what only top philosophers can do: she enables us to detect the taste of philosophy in the most conspicuous features of our daily lives."" Slavoj Žižek"

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Avital Ronell is University Professor of the Humanities at New York University.

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