Books by Rick Elmore
Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno are considered today to be the two most significant early t... more Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno are considered today to be the two most significant early theorists in founding critical theory. In their works and correspondence, both thinkers turn to art and the aesthetic as a vital way for understanding modern society and developing philosophical methods. This volume of original essays seeks to understand how they influenced each other and disagreed with each other on fundamental questions about art and the aesthetic. The books deals with a variety of key philosophical questions, such as: How does art involve distinctive modes of experience? What is the political significance of modern art?What does aesthetic experience teach us about the limitations of conceptual thought?How is aesthetic experience implicated in the very medium of thought, language? Ultimately the book presents a systematic argument for the foundational significance of the aesthetic in the development of the early critical theory movement.
Peer Reviewed Journal Articles by Rick Elmore
Cormac McCarthy Journal, 2024
while pessimism has long been a central theme of the scholarly engagement with McCarthy’s oeuvre,... more while pessimism has long been a central theme of the scholarly engagement with McCarthy’s oeuvre, Stella Maris and The Passenger offer his first full-throated defense of philosophical pessimism, Alicia Western’s principled insistence on the objective meaninglessness of existence and the indifference of the universe to human life the basis for her understanding and critique of mathematics, language, consciousness, madness, suicide, and the optimistic, common-sense view of reality. Read alongside the work of philosophical pessimists such as Thomas Ligotti, Eugene Thacker, Joshua Foa Dienstag, and Authur Schopenhauer,
this article shows how philosophical pessimism offers, for McCarthy, a roadmap for thinking through how humans ought to live, as well as a fundamental critique of Western culture. Hence, this article shows that one finds in Alicia’s philosophical pessimism a continuation of
McCarthy’s career-long critique of Western culture, as pessimism is shown to be at the very core of McCarthy’s philosophical and literary project.
The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 2023
The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 2021
Forty years after publication, Suttree remains McCarthy’s most enigmatic novel. The one consiste... more Forty years after publication, Suttree remains McCarthy’s most enigmatic novel. The one consistent element of the, by now, expansive body of scholarship is an agreement regarding the centrality of the title character. Yet while critics agree Suttree is the key to Suttree, there exists little agreement about the larger message of the novel. Against this confusion, we argue that it is a quest to reconcile his sense of self and understanding of life that drives Suttree’s actions throughout the novel, this quest illuminating not only McCarthy’s well-documented critique of Western culture but, more importantly, his own alternative conception of life, this alternative an egalitarian vision of society that brings to light the novel’s ethical imperative.
Mississippi Quarterly, 2019
Cormac McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, is generally read as a critique of m odernizat... more Cormac McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, is generally read as a critique of m odernization and progress, a lam ent for the loss of pastoral life and morality under the assault of m odern indus trial and urban developm ent.1 As Benjamin Child puts it, The Or chard Keepers central conflict is "the clash between the past and the present, between the maintenance of a traditional m ountain lifestyle/com m unity and the struggle to create a more profoundly stand ardized urban one" ( l ) .2 Yet while the novel certainly offers a bleak assessment of the loss of communal life in contem porary society, critics have tended to read this assessment, and M cCarthy's project more generally, as largely diagnostic, offering little in the way of an alternative beyond an elegiac nostalgia for the past or an improbable 'See Luce; Berry; Bell; Guillemin; Russell; Grammer; and Palmer. There has been considerable debate about how best to understand McCarthy's pastoralism; for exam ple, critics such as Luce and Berry argue for what they see as McCarthy's "complex," Marxist-inflected pastoralism, whereas Guillemin categorizes it as eco-pastoralism, yet all these critics agree that a pastoral framework organizes the novel.
The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 2019
The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 2019
The Cormac McCarthy Journal , 2018
Symposium, 2018
This paper follows the question of violence as a guide to exploring the link between the metaphys... more This paper follows the question of violence as a guide to exploring the link between the metaphysical, social, and political in Adorno's thought. More specifically, I argue that violence, in the form of the exclusion, domination, and fungibility of life, marks the shared space of the metaphysical, material, and ethical for Adorno. Hence, this project contests the longstanding Habermas-inspired notion that there is something unclear in the way in which Adorno's metaphysical and methodological critiques connect to his social and political concerns -- most specifically, his desire to address real suffering. In addition, this paper contributes to the growing interest in Adorno's Marxism, showing that it is through his commitments to Marx that Adorno sees the real, material importance of his critique of metaphysics and ontology, as well as the possibility for resisting the forces of social domination.
The Cormac McCarthy Journal , 2016
Politics & Policy, 2006
Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “symbolic exchange” represents an important concept in understandin... more Jean Baudrillard’s concept of “symbolic exchange” represents an important concept in understanding why Marx’s prediction regarding the collapse of capitalism has not been realized. Baudrillard adds to the Marxian concepts of use value and exchange value, suggesting that, in today’s consumer-oriented society, commodities take on a symbolic value that constitutes their “status” and, therefore, power. In the Western industrial societies that are “networked” into information cultures, the generation of symbolic value results from a constantly changing symbolic environment in which new demands for access to symbolic status are generated. Baudrillard sees the United States as the farthest along on the path to a simulated environment of symbolic exchange. Manufacturing for symbolic exchange is directed toward the production of the fetish: an object that is positioned purely for its symbolic value. By directing production increasingly in the direction of the fetish, as an object to be used in symbolic exchange, capitalism is able to sustain itself even after the material needs of the population are satisfied.
Peer Reviewed Book Chapters by Rick Elmore
Philosophy, Film, and the Dark Side of Interdependence, 2020
Biopolitics, particularly as developed by Michel Foucault and his Italian interpreters, has had l... more Biopolitics, particularly as developed by Michel Foucault and his Italian interpreters, has had little to say about animals or animal studies. Even the work of Giorgio Agamben, which most directly addresses animal life, presents a human-oriented and ultimately anthropocentric account of such life. Yet, there has been a growing body of work that brings together the discourses of biopolitics and animal studies, most specifically, in the analysis of biotechnology and the critique of capitalism’s role in the exploitation of animals and the natural world. In addition, there has been a recent attempt to cull from the diverse array of biopolitical discourses what one might call a general account of biopolitics, an account that, as I show, identifies, at the heart of biopolitics, a concern for the way in which the constituting of the categories of ‘life’ and ‘politics’ necessarily involves the exclusion of some ‘other’ life. On the basis of these developments and particularly this concern for the exclusion of life, I chart a common ground between biopolitics, Critical Animal Studies (CAS) and the work of Jacques Derrida, whose thinking provides the theoretical basis for much recent work in CAS. In particular, I contend that, read through the lens of this common concern for exclusion, one sees that Derrida’s concept of sovereignty is fundamentally biopolitical, not just in the sense that it involves life and politics, but more specifically, because it exemplifies the logic of exclusion at stake in biopolitics. Hence, this paper charts current developments in biopolitics by putting them into conversation with animal studies, mapping the deep affinity between the discourses of biopolitics, CAS, and the work of Derrida.
The Aesthetic Ground of Critical Theory, 2015
Going Postcard, 2016
There is a line in The Post Card that has always bothered me. Now, to be clear, I do not hate thi... more There is a line in The Post Card that has always bothered me. Now, to be clear, I do not hate this line. It does not keep me up at night. I do not have to suppress the urge to burn the book every time I read it. But I have never understood its phrasing or placement. It is, for me, in tension with the constellation of claims and concepts around which it circulates. This line comes in the second entry marked 6 June 1977 (PC,. In this passage, Derrida gives a reading of the postcard that inspires his text. One will recall that the image on this card is of Socrates seated at a writing desk, pen in hand, with a smaller Plato standing behind him, seemingly dictating. Derrida spends the majority of this passage analyzing a number of the peculiarities of this image (the positioning of the figures, the fact that it is Socrates writing and not Plato, the seeming confusion of master and pupil, teacher and student, etc). In the middle of this analysis, however, Derrida interjects the following statement, apparently in response to the question, "[t]o whom do you think he [Socrates] writes?" Derrida states, "[f]or me it is always more important to know that [to whom one writes] than to know what is being written; moreover I think it amounts to the same, to the other finally" (PC, 17/21). This is the line that has always troubled me, particularly because of the privilege it grants to knowledge of addressees over that of content. Allow me to elaborate.
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Books by Rick Elmore
Peer Reviewed Journal Articles by Rick Elmore
this article shows how philosophical pessimism offers, for McCarthy, a roadmap for thinking through how humans ought to live, as well as a fundamental critique of Western culture. Hence, this article shows that one finds in Alicia’s philosophical pessimism a continuation of
McCarthy’s career-long critique of Western culture, as pessimism is shown to be at the very core of McCarthy’s philosophical and literary project.
Peer Reviewed Book Chapters by Rick Elmore
this article shows how philosophical pessimism offers, for McCarthy, a roadmap for thinking through how humans ought to live, as well as a fundamental critique of Western culture. Hence, this article shows that one finds in Alicia’s philosophical pessimism a continuation of
McCarthy’s career-long critique of Western culture, as pessimism is shown to be at the very core of McCarthy’s philosophical and literary project.
Episode 40 is a long ride through rough country as we dig into The CROSSING, McCarthy's masterful middle volume in the Border Trilogy. My guests today are twin scholars Jonathan and Rick Elmore. That's right, twins. Jonathan Elmore is Associate Professor of English at Savannah State University and the Managing Editor of Watchung Review.. He is the editor of Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction: Narrative in an Era of Loss (Lexington) and co-author of An Introduction to African and Afro-Diasporic Peoples and Influences in British Literature and Culture before the Industrial Revolution (ALG). His scholarship has been published in The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Mississippi Quarterly, The British Fantasy Society Journal, Orbit, The Journal of Liberal Arts and Humanities, and The Criterion, among others.
His twin brother Rick Elmore is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Appalachian State University and Senior Managing Editor of book reviews at Symposium. He researches and teaches in the areas of twentieth-century French philosophy, critical theory, animal philosophy, and Cormac McCarthy Studies. He is the co-editor of The Biopolitics of Punishment: Derrida and Foucault (Northwestern University Press). His articles and essays have appeared in Politics & Policy, Symplokē, Symposium, Mississippi Quarterly, and The Cormac McCarthy Journal, among others.