As Prof. Anthony Curtis Adler seeks to show in his new book, Celebricities: Media Culture and the Phenomenology of Gadget Commodity Life, continental philosophy and literary theory offer powerful tools for thinking about the hyperconsumeristic, media-driven culture of the present. Yet rather than just applying high theory to seemingly prosaic cultural phenomena, Adler shows how these phenomena themselves are fundamentally theoretical in nature and indeed demand new ways of thinking about such weighty philosophical topics as being and truth. Celebricities consists of two parts: the first, a sustained discussion of the phenomology of television, celebrity, and gadgets built around close readings of such authors as Heidegger and Althusser; the second, a series of fragmentary reflections which seek to engage in a form of thinking uniquely “at home” in the uncanny element of specifically contemporary forms of media-saturated experience.

 

Adler's book was published by Fordham University Press, which is one of the top academic presses for continental philosophy, as part of the newly established Idiom series. The mission of the Idiom, which is edited by Jaques Lezra (NYU) and Paul North (Yale), is to “develop idioms that expand, deform, reinvigorate, or exceed existing genres and styles of theoretical writing in any discipline.” It already includes books written by such famous living philosophers as Jean-Luc Nancy and Werner Hamacher as well as emerging scholars at top U.S. universities.