De Man Book Blurb

I was asked to do it and I loved it. Here it is. It's for Theory and the Disappearing Future, a collection by Claire Colebrook, J. Hillis Miller and Tom Cohen. It talks about my ecology books a little, which is I guess why they asked me to do the blurb.

This gem of a book should be read by anyone who wants to avoid repeating the past. Like a faintly heard, uncanny background noise that starts to ooze menacingly around the facile conversations in the foreground, De Man emerges as a figure with a crucial message regarding the current world historical, ecological emergency. De Man rises again, not the person as such, but the persona: a deconstructor distinct from Derrida, attuned to the radical contingency and secrecy of language, the impossibility of easy ways out. De Man is put into conversation with Deleuze and Guattari, Agamben, even de Landa and Lovelock. De Man returns from the dead, not as a rejuvenated person but as a haunting warning against compulsive affirmations of “life.” Oh, and there's a very beautiful set of his notes on Benjamin, in facsimile and transcription.

Timothy Morton, author of The Ecological Thought and Ecology without Nature