Culture(s) and Authenticity

This book addresses epistemological and political aspects of the discursive pursuit of authenticity and various ways in which the inauthentic is devalued and marginalized. The essays critically analyze various means by which the authentic is searched for, staged, admired, dismissed, replicated or simply taken for granted. What is at work in such discursive practices is a poetics of imitation. This is seen as a paradoxical kind of poetics which renounces the authenticity of the created text for the sake of its semi-religious offering to the origin. Such a divination of the Authentic posits translation as an idolatrous act accompanied by a suspicion of its simultaneously being iconoclastic.