How We Got Here
Melville Plus Nietzsche Divided by the Square Root of (Allan) Bloom Times Žižek (Squared) Equals Bannon
2024
First Published
4.00
Average Rating
114
Number of Pages
Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Q-Anon, Fox News, etc., etc., etc. have kidnapped the last century of intellectual thought and philosophical poststructuralism, quantum physics, deconstruction, the current "crisis" in "nonfiction"-journalism- media-"truthiness." If the perceiver, by his very presence, alters what's perceived, Steve Bannon, Vladimir Putin, Vladislav Surkov (performance-artist-turned-Putin-strategist), et al. have quite consciously created—are all still quite consciously creating on a day-by-day basis—a universe in which nothing is true and therefore public discourse is, in effect, over. Dominion Voting Systems was founded to rig elections for Hugo Chavez; Italian space lasers modified voting machine data; the FBI staged the January 6 this is a strategy that goes back at least as far as Dostoevsky's underground man. God is dead, so everything is permitted. Or is it? How We Got Here - provocative, accessible, persuasive, and addictive - is a crucial intervention in which David Shields argues that Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of (Allan) Bloom times Žižek (squared) equals Bannon.
Avg Rating
4.00
Number of Ratings
15
5 STARS
27%
4 STARS
47%
3 STARS
27%
2 STARS
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1 STARS
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Author
David Shields
Author · 22 books
David Shields is the author of fourteen books, including Reality Hunger (Knopf, 2010), which was named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications. GQ called it "the most provocative, brain-rewiring book of 2010"; the New York Times called it "a mind-bending manifesto." His previous book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), was a New York Times bestseller. His other books include Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Believer, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney's, and Utne Reader; he's written reviews for the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.
