Modes of Irrationality Book

Really a dense book. The only criticism I have of this brilliant text is that he relies almost completely on the "Heavy Hitters" of Continental Philosophy (Adorno and Horkheimer, Heidegger, Deleuze, Nietzsche, Lyotard, etc.). While I greatly appreciate the Lit. Review that this book provides, I'm not necessarily sure if it says anything new.

Brassier begins with an amazing rehashing of an ongoing debate between Folk Psychologists and Cognitive Psycholgists (namely Wilfrid Sellars and Paul Churchland), but throughout this text I kept thinking of other books I'd have to master before sinking my teeth into this one. It is really a shame because Brassier is getting lots of attention in the current philosophical circles - along with Graham Harman (who does roughly the same thing, but with Heidegger exclusively)... this sort of inter-textual mish mash of quotations from other works tends to leave me feeling stale.

I had high hopes for this when I ordered it as a desk copy, but soon realized that I could never use this in a meaningful classroom setting. There are several points in the text where I had to sit back and re-read, notably his work on "The Pure and Empty Form of Death" - a juxtaposition of Heidegger and Deleuze. But overall, it seemed like a condensation of other books that one could argue are more important. Brassier's main thesis seems to be a rekindling of the Enlightenment view on Representation, instead of its rebuke (ala Foucault, who incidentally is not indexed or footnoted at all, probably because Foucault does the exact opposite of Brassier in this regard)... All in all, I had high hopes, but was disappointed.

An extremely dense text. It may take several readings to fully grasp the complexity of the argument. Not entirely certain if the payoff is worth the effort. Definitely something for aspiring graduate students who deal with Continental Philosophy in an inter-disciplinary manner (such as myself)... overall, not a light read by any stretch of the imagination.