A powerful argument against and brilliant analysis of the liberal humanist project.

As an engaging examination of the current 'state of play' of what is possibly the most protracted of contemporary philosophical controversies. Spanos' book represents an important contribution. Highly recommended.

Challenging and demanding. Spanos wants to stake out a broader role for literary theory via Heidegger, thereby making it a kind of social criticism. Spanos’s text is, by turns, a retrospective gaze at his own thinking on Heidegger and his encounter with Foucault, a polemical defense of Heidegger’s continued validity and relevance in literary studies, a scathing critique of what he calls ‘humanism’ and its various attempts to delegitimate Heideggerian discourse by implicating it in Heidegger’s politics, and a call for a ‘post-humanist’ thinking. Professor Spanos argues that it is not in American appropriations of deconstruction’s ‘textuality’ but in Heidegger’s ‘destruction’ and a careful analysis of Heidegger’s texts (not his politics) that literary theory can become (Spanos says ‘retrieve’) a kind of oppositional cultural criticism as well.