Facets of Modernity

What does it mean to be human in modernity? This book examines being human, in its theoretical, practical, and productive aspects, not in abstraction from historical, social, and political settings, but rather as set in concrete historical and material circumstances. Through the analysis and close reading of a number of texts of the modern thinkers, which include those of Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Kracauer, Heidegger, Benjamin, Hans Jonas and Agnes Heller, it demonstrates that the complexity and variety of the human experience is grounded in the modern subjectivity, which establishes itself as universal, rational, autonomous, and necessary. Such a subjectivity is characterised as self-legislating or establishing the universal moral law and is further defined by historicity, or the interpretation of its actions as conditioned by the previous and current social and political circumstances. The book then shows that the multiple facets of modernity make the experience of being human fascinating, complicated and ultimately unique.

In this collection of twelve impressively erudite essays, Dmitri Nikulin provides close readings of crucial philosophical and literary texts. His interpretations include philosophers from Plato to Rorty, Agnes Heller, and Rancière and poets from Homer and Theognis to Dostoevskij and Tolstoy. Nikulin analyses his topics with extreme accuracy and high originality. The book amounts to no less than a theory of modernity, reflecting on subjectivity and rationality, boredom and comedy, nature and history, free speech and the beautiful, science and imagination.--Christoph Horn, Professor of Philosophy, University of Bonn, Dmitri Nikulin is our best student of Bakhtinian dialogue--understood not only as multiplicity, tolerance, and mutual talk, but as a lubricant for the truest practice of both philosophy and comedy. True practice, for the lonely modern subject, requires that we rid ourselves of the occluded mirror. These twelve incandescent essays show how necessary and difficult that task is.--Caryl Emerson, Princeton University

Dmitri Nikulin is professor of philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. He is the author of a number of books including Dialectic and Dialogue; Comedy, Seriously; and The Concept of History.