About the Book:In this study, Teresa L. Ebert makes a spirited, pioneering case for a new cultural critique committed to the struggles for human freedom and global equality. Demonstrating the implosion of the linguistic turn that isolates culture from historical processes, The Task of Cultural Critique maps the contours of an emerging materialist critique that contributes toward a critical social and cultural consciousness. Through groundbreaking analyses of cultural texts, Ebert questions the contemporary Derridian dogma that asserts “the future belongs to ghosts.” Events-to-come are not spectral, she contends, but the material outcome of global class struggles. Not “hauntology” but history produces cultural practices and their conflictive representations–from sexuality, war, and consumption to democracy, torture, globalization, and absolute otherness. With close readings of texts from Proust and Balzac to “Chick Lit,” from Lukcs, de Man, Deleuze, and Marx to Derrida, iek, Butler, Kollontai, and Agamben, the book opens up new directions for cultural critique today.Table of Contents: Preface: The Critique of Interpretive Reason ixPART 1 ANATOMY OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL CRITIQUE1. The Spectral Concrete 3 2. The Abstract of Transformative Critique 27 3. Desiring Surfaces 46PART 2 THE WORK OF CRITIQUE4. Affective Pedagogy and Feminist Critique 69 5. Chick Lit: “Not Your Mother’s Romance Novels” 97 6. Red Love 118 7. Globalization, the “Multitude,” and Cynical Critique 134 8. Reading Ideology: Marx, de Man, and Critique 169 Coda: Reclaiming Totality 195 Bibliography 197 Index 211