In The Already Dead, Eric Cazdyn examines the ways that contemporary medicine, globalization, politics, and culture intersect to produce a condition and concept that he names "the new chronic." Cazdyn argues that just as contemporary medicine uses targeted drug therapies and biotechnology to manage rather than cure diseases, global capitalism aims not for resolution but rather for a continual state of crisis management that perpetuates the iniquities of the status quo. Engaging critical theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, he explores the ways that crisis affects perceptions of time and denies alternative ways of being and thinking.

To resist the exploitative crisis state, which Cazdyn terms "the global abyss," he posits the concept of "the already dead," a condition in which the subject (medical, political, psychological) has been killed but has yet to die. Embracing this condition, he argues, allows for a revolutionary consciousness open to a utopian future. Woven into Cazdyn's analysis are personal anecdotes about his battle with leukemia and his struggle to obtain Canadian citizenship during his illness. These narratives help to illustrate his systemic critique, one that reconfigures the relationship between politics, capitalism, revolution, and the body.

This book considers how a culture of crisis management--what Cazdyn calls "the new chronic"-- has come to dominate all aspects of contemporary life, from biomedicine to economics to politics. Drawing from his own experiences battling leukemia and the subsequent effects of his illness on the process of becoming a Canadian citizen, Cazdyn unravels the logic of the new chronic where people find themselves suspended in a space between life and death. He argues that we need a new form of revolution that will not seek to "cure" our social and political ills, but rather disrupts the temporal and spatial constraints of the current contemporary condition. The book touches on a lot of issues that are central to our list, including global capitalism, biomedicine, immigration, and the power and limitations of the modern nation-state.

About the Author

Eric Cazdyn is Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan; editor of Trespasses: Selected Writings of Masao Miyoshi, (both published by Duke University Press); and coauthor, with Imre Szeman, of After Globalization.

Reviews
"Cazdyn's treatise is provocative, creative, and intelligent, calling for no less than a global revolution in action and ideology. Anchored in American events and history, it also has much to offer at the international level, and it will be a welcome companion to a wide range of curricula in the humanities, medical, and social sciences." - Lawrence C. Rubin, Journal of American Culture
"In The Already Dead, Eric Cazdyn establishes what he calls a nonmoralizing critique of capitalism, starting from the premise that crisis does not symptomize the failure of the system but rather its proper functioning. He is committed to a systemic, radical critique that keeps open the possibilities of revolution. This is a bracing and provocative book, both ideationally and stylistically."-Rei Terada, University of California, Irvine
"This immensely ambitious and unclassifiable theoretical work begins by projecting a new kind of temporality-the new chronic-out of medical practice, in order to range across the political, the cultural, the national, the autobiographical, and the economic, touching in passing on film and globalization, and in the process unearthing new life forms: the already dead, the always dead, and the always already dead. It is an exciting journey."-Fredric Jameson, Duke University
"Cazdyn's treatise is provocative, creative, and intelligent, calling for no less than a global revolution in action and ideology. Anchored in American events and history, it also has much to offer at the international level, and it will be a welcome companion to a wide range of curricula in the humanities, medical, and social sciences." -- Lawrence C. Rubin * Journal of American Culture *
"While it is not the only reason to read the book, it is the performance itself, the manner in which Cazdyn artfully combines three areas of study and speaks of them in parallel with one another, that is most valuable, no matter the discipline to which the reader belongs. Cazdyn invokes a system that is both utopian (in its impossible future - the American Dream is always just a step away) and pre-apocalyptic." -- Valerie Savard * Science Fiction Film and Television *
"Cazdyn covers a dizzying array of examples of the way this shift has become normalized-drawn from popular culture, cinema, and literature. One must pause to marvel at the facility with which he melds such analysis with moving personal essays." -- Kurt Newman * U.S. Intellectual History Blog *
"This book is a roller-coaster ride through a broad swath of cultural studies, psychoanalysis and the social sciences-from the relationship of the chronic subject to phenomena in capitalism, biopolitics and global formations, and from trends in medicine to descriptions of how death and life are brought together in the literary and psychoanalytic imagination." -- Sharon R. Kaufman * Culture, Health & Sexuality *
"The Already Dead comes at a critical moment in which the vulgarities of the global capitalist system have become increasingly difficult to conceal. The book's approach, at once theoretical and personal, historical and cultural, seeks new modes of revolutionary consciousness that can destabilize both within and without the capitalist system so as to reconfigure everything." -- Adam Broinowski * Reviews in Cultural Theory *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822352280
Author Eric Cazdyn
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 345g