The Seduction of Unreason  

"I have selected an early painting from Giorgio de Chirico’s so-called metaphysical period, “The Song of Love,” as The Seduction of Unreason’s graphic template. In many respects, the painting’s imagery is germane to the theme implied by my title: that “unreason” has an uncanny power to fascinate and seduce."--The Seduction of Unreason (2004) by Richard Wolin

"Anticipating the poststructuralist credo, Lévi-Strauss went on to proclaim that the goal of the human sciences “was not to constitute, but to dissolve man.”[in The Savage Mind] From here it is but a short step to Foucault’s celebrated, neo-Nietzschean adage concerning the “death of man” in The Order of Things."--The Seduction of Unreason (2004) by Richard Wolin

"When postmodernism is at issue in the text that follows, I am primarily referring to the last-named phenomenon: the rejection of the intellectual and cultural assumptions of modernity in the name of “will to power” (Nietzsche), “sovereignty” (Bataille), an “other beginning” ([der andere Anfang], Heidegger), “différance” (Derrida), or a “different economy of bodies and pleasures” (Foucault)."--The Seduction of Unreason (2004) by Richard Wolin

"Hitler has compelled humanity to accept a new categorical imperative: orient your thinking and acting so that Auschwitz would never repeat itself, so that nothing similar would recur."--Negative Dialectics (1966) by Theodor W. Adorno

"One of the crucial elements underlying this problematic right-left synthesis is a strange chapter in the history of ideas whereby latter-day anti-philosophes such as Nietzsche and Heidegger became the intellectual idols of post-World War II France--above all, for poststructuralists like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. Paradoxically, a thoroughgoing cynicism about reason and democracy, once the hallmark of reactionary thought, became the stock-in-trade of the postmodern left. As observers of the French intellectual scene have frequently noted, although Germany lost on the battlefield, it triumphed in the seminar rooms, bookstores, and cafés of the Latin Quarter. During the 1960s Spenglerian indictments of "Western civilization," once cultivated by leading representatives of the German intellectual right, migrated across the Rhine where they gained a new currency. Ironically, Counter-Enlightenment doctrines that had been taboo in Germany because of their unambiguous association with fascism--after all, Nietzsche had been canonized as the Nazi regime's official philosopher, and for a time Heidegger was its most outspoken philosophical advocate--seemed to best capture the mood of Kulturpessimismus that predominated among French intellectuals during the postwar period. Adding insult to injury, the new assault against philosophie came from the homeland of the Enlightenment itself."--The Seduction of Unreason (2004) by Richard Wolin, introduction

"The critique of postmodernism in the pages that follow has a different aim. My concern is that at a certain point postmodernism’s hostility towards “reason” and “truth” is intellectually untenable and politically debilitating."--The Seduction of Unreason (2004) by Richard Wolin