Textual Layering

This volume of essays sets out to rethink our relation to textual tradition against the background of several contemporary developments, such as the emergence of digital culture, the increasing spectacularization of psychic as well as social life, the renegotiation of historical thinking and the precarious position of the theoretical Humanities within academia. To this end, the volume re-invests the concept of "layering," a concept currently used in a wide range of fields, including metaphor studies and linguistics, cybernetics, the social sciences, art and architecture. Drawing on existing definitions of "layering", the essays brought together in this book return to and re-appraise some of the most crucial concerns in the post-1960s theoretical scene: i.e., concerns over the strained interplay between writing and the body; textuality and history; critique, differance and the feminine; memory, trace and the immemorial.
The aim of the diverse - often polemical -- analyses carried out in this volume is to reactivate the critical force of textual tradition today through a renewed appreciation of its historical embeddedness, its libidinal sources, as well as its complex economy of separation and contact, diachronicity and synchronicity, (re)layering and de-layering. This book will be of interest to scholars of Continental Philosophy, Literary Theory, Gender Studies, Architecture, Film and Visual Culture Studies, Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism, Post-colonial Studies, Political and Social Theory.