{"title":"Books by Steven Connor","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781789140729","title":"The Madness of Knowledge – On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing","description":"Many human beings have considered the powers and the limits of human knowledge, but few have wondered about the power that the idea of knowledge has over us. The Madness of Knowledge is the first book to investigate this emotional inner life of knowledge – the lusts, fantasies, dreams and fears that the idea of knowing provokes. There are in-depth discussions of the imperious will to know, of Freud’s epistemophilia, or love of knowledge, and the curiously insistent links between madness, magical thinking and the desire for knowledge. Steven Connor also probes secrets and revelations, quarreling and the history of quizzes and ‘general knowledge’, charlatanry and pretension, both the violent disdain and the sanctification of the stupid, as well as the emotional investment in the spaces and places of knowledge, from the study to the library.   In an age of artificial intelligence, alternative facts and mistrust of truth, The Madness of Knowledge offers an opulent, enlarging and sometimes unnerving psychopathology of intellectual life.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56306842337653,"sku":"9781789140729","price":27.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781789140729_a3dbb180-8c90-4c41-b08c-36ef1393dd70.jpg?v=1786027328"},{"product_id":"9781836390879","title":"Gaston Bachelard – An Intellectual Biography","description":"This is the first English biography of Gaston Bachelard, a philosopher who bridged the worlds of science and imagination. Raised in rural France, Bachelard served in the First World War, worked for the post office and pursued degrees in science and philosophy while teaching in his local school. His journey led to a professorship at the Sorbonne, where he influenced many prominent postwar French thinkers. Known as both a philosopher of science and author of works on the imagination inspired by the elements – earth, air, fire and water – Bachelard needed to negotiate a constant tension between science and poetry, calculation and dream. This biography provides a complete portrait of Bachelard, illuminating his struggles with the nature of knowledge itself.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56307708625269,"sku":"9781836390879","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781836390879_741a05a6-cc58-42e6-b4e7-991070b33464.jpg?v=1786034560"},{"product_id":"exorbitance","title":"Exorbitance","description":"\u003cp\u003eAlthough modern life provides many examples of exorbitance – of wealth, growth, information, ambition, consumption, violence – preoccupation with what is 'over the top' is not new. What is it about the idea of going unreasonably beyond what is reasonable that exercises fascination? In this wide-ranging work, essayist and scholar Steven Connor reflects on the considerable and persistent force of culture's appetite for the exorbitant—a dynamic that not only survives despite the disapproval which accompanies it, but thrives on that disapproval.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eConnor's discussion of the uses of hyperbole points to the essentially aggrandising function of all language, while chapters on the contemporary obsession with obsession and the unholy ecstasies of the ascetic fill out the orgiastic exorbitance of precaution. In the proliferations of modern bureaucracy, every attempt at reduction seems to stimulate further expansion. The long history of the ideas of usury and interest allows for new possibilities of exponential bubbles and crashes. The book reaches its climax with considerations of the libido of extremity in religious glory and apocalypse, along with the cultic rapture of the idea of extinction in Anthropocene thinking. Engaging thinkers from Erasmus to Freud and Agamben, Connor reflects on the protean forms taken by the imagination of the exorbitant.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57484170723701,"sku":"9781503646926","price":26.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781503646926.jpg?v=1786266211"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-steven-connor.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}