Playful Intelligence

Reviews / Votes

There is, I think, nothing out there truly comparable to Playful Intelligence in terms of focus, insight, scope, cross-disciplinary applicability, theoretical urgency, and learning. -- Christian Moraru, University of North Carolina, USA * American Book Review * From Kandinsky to Kafka to systems theory to psychoanalysis to digital feedback loops to Roberto Bolano to Zen... A sprawling, maddening, jet-lagged, and eminently stunning trip through the ruinous Arcades of the 21st century. * Justin Read, University at Buffalo (SUNY), USA * Sussman rises to the task with a book that is as breathtaking in its scope as it is trenchant in its insights. From cybernetics to literature to philosophy and back again, Sussman's ignition of his inexhaustible erudition with a promethean spark of creativity powers a riveting and relentless interrogation of intelligence, a notion that engulfs those of us in the academic domain so closely that it seldom occurs to ask ourselves what, exactly, it is, how its conceptualization affects us, and how we came to think of it the way we do today. * William Egginton, The Johns Hopkins University, USA * Who knew high theory could still be this much fun? Sussman's Playful Intelligence stages a mass wedding (or is it a group grope?) in which Dostoevsky, Kafka, Derrida, and Lacan pair off with the unexpected likes of Douglas Hofstadter, Anthony Wilden, Gregory Bateson, and D. W. Winnicott. His delightful critical dances are enlivened with rhetorical flights of uninhibited and erudite wordplay. Swinging cybernetics across literary landscapes, Sussman takes systems discourses on joyrides that both disrupt their scientific pretensions and refresh their relevance to the philosophical humanities. Never dull, utterly sincere, sublimely good-natured, and blithely beyond mundane academic cares, Playful Intelligence performs its theme to perfection. * Bruce Clarke, Texas Tech University, USA * Playful Intelligence exemplifies the encouragement that interdisciplinary thinking can provide to critics who still believe in the salutary potential of humanistic endeavors. * Journal of Modern Literature *