In Crimes of the Future, Jean-Michel Rabate offers the reader a dazzling series of encounters with thinkers, writers and artists who, since Kant, have fruitfully complicated our sense of the future. Moving with ease across a remarkable range of subjects (in both senses) and several linguistic and philosophical traditions, Rabate teases out threads that link Mishima and Benjamin, Kafka and Hegel, Althusser and Antigone, and very many more. The result is an exhilarating and illuminating intellectual workout. -- Derek Attridge, Professor of English Literature, University of York, UK
In Crimes of the Future Rabate demonstrates why Theory has a future; a vital one that sets out to answer the question 'how global should Theory be?' Rabate rethinks a tradition grounded in philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to theories of the subject for the human sciences today. New materialisms, object relations, technological and digital languages, ethics and bioethics, post-feminism and post-humanism, these are among the rich tendencies and problems foregrounded in this study. The intellectual topography is spot-on. There are few books that provide such a comprehensive and coherent overview of theory between 2001 and 2014 or that experiment with new conjugations so boldly. -- Emily Apter, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, New York University, USA
Crimes of the Future, Theory and its Global Reproduction does not only concern itself with modernity's obsession with producing a homeless subjectivity, but commensurately, with the face off between the individual and the community, the universal and the particular. It also admits to the thrill that we moderns experience even before our crime - the crime of the destruction of the past - is or was committed. Our expectation in the face of our crime is one with the thrill of the atomic eruption, the bomb blast. It leaves behind only the ironic laughter accompanying the destruction of ancient values that we theorists are not simply helpless to stop but actively engaged in producing as we too seek to participate in the infernal globalized production of ideas. * Dorothea Olkowski, Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado, USA *
Jean-Michel Rabate's Crimes of the Future reunites a number of interconnected essays that address the meaning and significance of theory in today's world. As the critic demonstrates, these are urgent issues. ... Counterintuitive as it may sound, theory has actually flourished in its post-theory days. Crimes of the Future demonstrates this explicitly, through the specific argument it builds across its chapters, and implicitly, as a wide-ranging and authoritative theoretical intervention itself. ... Replete with remarkably insightful and through-provoking connections, exceptionally learned and timely, Crimes of the Future provides a comprehensive and well-balanced assessment of theory's significance in the present and future global world. -- Christian Moraru * Journal of Modern Literature *
