The Work of Warning: And other essays on the question of critique

Philosophy, Cultural Criticism

"In dreaming desire, there are no real consequences. In order to make such fantasies real, we must disarm and thence dismiss no less than history along with biography. The perpetrators dream awake. This is how they can commit the impassioned acts of horror upon the others who now appear to them as mere projections, in their way or submissive, it matters not. It is not a case of decorum managing desire, or even compassion trumping the passions. It is rather that the vision of primordial Man has been reconstructed, and at cost, in the picayune and rationalized manner which modernity requires of it. No less costly than the first murder, the most recent one is yet less authentic since it is so seldom necessary. I am no longer an endangered species. In my fullest presence, I have become the one who endangers, and mine ownmost death can only be owned in life by the killing of others. This is the unreasoned monstrosity of a faux-phenomenological phantasy: that there are no unwilling victims, that I no longer dream alone." (from The Work of Warning)

In this, his sixth essay collection, G.V. Loewen confronts both the ground of the self-absorbed culture and the meta-narrative such a culture tells itself in order to rationalize its order. The range of topics includes transgenderedness, anti-Semitism, the state of higher education, 'wokeness', personhood, and love. The critical conceptualizations that backdrop these many-facetted studies include those sociolinguistic, ethical, epistemological, and theological, among others. New insights into such taboos as child pornography and the "Jewish Question," as well as illuminatingly personal statements on both teaching and writing, make The Work of Warning a memorably diverse journey.