The Great Dismissal

Description

Longtime scholar and critic Henry Sussman deploys anecdote, reportage, memoir, and a pilgrimage to major intellectual stops along his trajectory in marshaling the disbelief and dismay prompted by the rise of anti-intellectualism in the past few decades and reflected most disturbingly in Donald Trump’s ascension to the US presidency.
All the usual suspects are present and accounted for: fragmentation and polarization of the public sphere, to some degree facilitated by digital communications and social media; the decline of impartiality and a sharp increase in self-interested interference in politic, legal, and cultural spheres; the normalization of pathological narcissism in public life; the blanket dismissal of scientific findings and their counterparts in the domain of the humanities and social sciences.
In retracing his own intellectual and experiential steps, Sussman revisits many of his lasting inspirations, including Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Immanuel Kant, and J. Hillis Miller. The result is an intellectual meditation on ‘the great dismissal,’ in public and political life, of venerable and vital humanistic traditions, ethics, and ways of thinking.

Henry Sussman retired in 2017 as Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature at Yale University, USA, after a 45-year teaching career. He is the author of 11 books, including Around the Book (2011), The Aesthetic Contract (2007), Psyche and Text: The Sublime and the Grandiose in Literature, Psychopathology and Culture (1993), and High Resolution: Critical Theory and the Problem of Literacy (1989). He has edited five volumes, including Acts of Narrative, co-edited with Carol Jacobs (2003). He is the founder and co-editor of the curated, theory-driven weblog, Feedback (www.openhumanitiespress.org/feedback). Professor Sussman is currently Visiting Professor of German at Rutgers University, USA.

1. November 18, 2020. Postal.
2. October 6, 2020. Apocalypse red, apocalypse blue.
3. December 12, 2020. Confederacy of zombies.
4. October 18, 2019. Protests, curtailment of bus service, Queens.
5. June 7, 2020. Atlas of vanished places.
6. February 10, 2021. Requiem to disinterest.
7. January 27, 2020. New feudal lords.
8. Thanksgiving, 2021. Partisans of writing: Mayer with Derrida
9. April 1, 2018. Welcome to the Great Dismissal!
10. August 15, 2020. Co-lateral dommages.
11. December, 31, 2020. What on earth to do with the bodies?
12. August 30, 2018. Midterm enigmas for progressives.
13. December 15, 2021. Partisans of writing. Tobin Smith.
14. January 19, 2021. Politics of entertainment
15. May 24, 2020. Sikhs and other cabbies.
16. November 15, 2020. Electronic ticks and leaden bubbles.
17. June 13, 2019. Three deer in a development near Harrisburg, PA.
18. Labor Day, 2021. Partisans of writing. Shoshanah Zuboff.
19. March 15, 2022. Partisans of writing. Adam Serwer.
20. February 14, 2022. University of the street.
21. May 15, 2022. This Thing that dwells within us.
22. June 27, 2022. Dismissal day: The strange loop of identity politics.
23. January 23, 2023. I was there.

“This book establishes a new critical standard for memoir. The Great Dismissal demolishes efforts to expunge controversial books from our society simply because they induce people to think. Through an improvised mash-up of original poetry, trenchant cultural analysis, and touching memoir, Sussman’s amazing book is an electroshock to the deadened brain of America. This kaleidoscopic survey of life during the Trump-COVID years for one of Derrida’s most celebrated students is an extremely important and highly original work of social and political criticism. A must read for anyone who wants to make thinking great again!” —Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Professor of English and Philosophy, University of Houston, Victoria, USA, and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange“In The Great Dismissal, Henry Sussman crafts an extraordinary voice meticulously registering the existential vagaries of life in New York City during the twin plagues of COVID and Trump. This intimately personal, nonlinear chronicle foregrounds contemporary journalism that challenges the mendacity, hypocrisy, and subterfuge of American political culture. The Great Dismissal is a sustained meditation on intellectual redemptions that refuse to be dismissed by the Pharisees of disinformation.” —Bruce Clarke, Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science, Texas Tech University, USA

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