Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Ecstasy of Reproduction: Postmodernity and Its Contemporaneity

The Ecstasy of Reproduction: Postmodernity and Its Contemporaneity

Castelli, Alberto

Hardcover

PhilosophyLiterary CriticismGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 1839998725
ISBN13: 9781839998720
Publisher: Anthem Press
Published: Feb 3 2026
Pages: 166
Weight: 0.87
Height: 0.50 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Argues that we are still firmly within postmodernity, not beyond it, and that contemporary culture is defined less by creation than by reproduction--an age where originality has vanished, history is dissolving, and hyperreality feels more real than reality itself

The Ecstasy of Reproduction strives to address the crucial questions of our era--inevitable questions that require perspective and objectivity, but questions that seem invisible. The author explains contemporaneity, a contemporaneity that he still terms postmodernity. This is because, regardless of what a few scholars assert, no other working definition has proved to be a more accurate replacement. We are at least a century away from its ending. And when the end will come, it will not be a transition but an implosion. If we keep silent, we can hear the explosion already. Now we must wait for the shockwave. The book opens with postmodernity (Chapter 1) and closes with postmodernity (Chapter 8). It ends, however, with a Post Scriptum: it was meant to be a speech for a conference, it became the screenshot of the century. In between is a description of its aesthetic and behavioral expressions in the past decades (Chapter 4). The author reasons about the end of beauty (Chapter 5), terms contemporaneity Kitsch (Chapter 3), and concludes that Kitsch is the end of art (Chapter 2). He questions the possibility of creation, culture, the author, and the artist (Chapters 6 and 7). Ca va sans dire originality is a thing of the past. The one of the present age is not an exercise of plagiarism, it is simply that to create is to reproduce. The author writes this text with immense intellectual responsibility and feels that history is a vanishing process. If the artificiality of hyperreality is more real than reality, then it is difficult to believe that science is progress. Even more when a mass of anonymous consumers dances in unison before a hologram.

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