By Mitch Rose
Publisher: University of Toronto
Date: 01/15/2025
Description:
Throughout the 20th century, the question of culture was a central pillar of social thought. Today, the concept has disappeared from the academic landscape. Despite pressing debates about culture wars and nativism, there seems to be little interest in discussing, much less theorising, the concept of culture as a credible explanatory tool. Dreams of Presence revives the culture concept by approaching it as an existential, rather than sociological, phenomenon. Drawing upon Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida and Zizek, the argument focuses on the existential conditions that lacerate, subvert, and incapacitate human willing. In this framing, culture is conceptualised as a refuge: a site where subjects endeavour to claim some ownership over a life that perpetually eludes them. Culture is not a set of social structures imposed upon fully realised subjects but something subjects cultivate and care for because it provides them the means to think themselves, to dream themselves, as sovereign beings.